‘Ideological soul mates’: how China sceptic Robert Lighthizer sold Donald Trump on a trade war
- In mid-2017, Robert Lightizer delivered a history lesson to Donald Trump and his cabinet on US-China trade negotiations, and what he saw as decades of failure
- The implications were clear – after plenty of talk, it was time for the US to get tough with China
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Andrew Restuccia and Megan Cassella on politico.com on December 26, 2018.
Robert Lighthizer thought it was time for a history lesson.
It was mid-2017, and US President Donald Trump – who had campaigned on a vow to bully China into changing its trade practices – had so far taken little concrete action against the Asian power since taking office earlier that year.
So Lighthizer, the United States trade representative and a decades-long sceptic of Beijing, commandeered one of the White House’s weekly trade policy meetings, delivering a meticulous presentation to his colleagues about the decades-long failure of US policy toward Beijing.
Surrounded by cabinet secretaries and senior advisers to the president, Lighthizer stood at the end of a long table in the Roosevelt Room and ticked through the economic dialogues with the Chinese that past presidents hoped would fundamentally change the trade dynamic between the two economic superpowers – but ultimately, in his view, yielded little progress.
Then, a few weeks later, Lighthizer took the exact same message to Trump in the Oval Office.