I just posted the below as a comment but I figured I’d start a thread, too, because I’m curious and I feel like a week of obsessive news reading hasn’t really shed any clarity on anything.
Now that China has refused to back down from Trump’s escalation, I’m wondering how Trump is going to wiggle out of this one. He can announce a 90 day pause with some lie about how China begged him to come to the table to save face domestically, but that maneuver might not actually bring China to negotiations. China seems to be in “never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake” mode and I don’t see them responding to something like a temporary pause.
The pro tariff crowd seems to be thinking that China will go into a recession before the US does, so the US will win the game of chicken, but China probably has more options for responding to a recession, especially given the fact that the government isn’t a bunch of idiotic, bumbling aristocrats and the flight from the US bond market has continued. No one is going to want to lend us the money it’ll take to weather a serious downturn given the fact that we’re run by crazy people.
So, assuming Trump is made to see the warning lights again, what does he ask for? He has jiu-jitsu’d himself into a no-win position because reshoring all of the manufacturing that left four decades ago is a nonstarter. I guess he could demand that China agrees to import a certain amount of US goods to lower the trade deficit, but they made that offer last time and then immediately ignored it because why wouldn’t they? It’s unenforceable because any retaliatory action the US could take brings us right back here. So what is a non-idiotic offer to China to get talks started? What will their opening demands be?
I think China is going to pull and Iran and just say screw trying to make a deal. They have a whole world to trade with and the Americans have no spending power, and their dollar will be more and more worth less.
The Democrats are fully on board the Red Scare train they’ve been doing it against Russia for a decade now. Jumping on the anti China bandwagon is easy for them. So I can see if China sees that even if they wait Cheeto out, the replacements are more than happy to continue the Red Scare treatment.
What will bring things back? American jealousy. China will be far ahead in energy efficiency and purchasing treat power per capita while America goes full “you’ll own nothing as a service.” Which itself will collapse because of rapid enshittification.
The rest of the world will trade with China and BRICS. America will fade as THE country to look up to.