Annie Lowrey: How Trump thinks tariffs work (and how they actually work)

As Reihan Salam has argued, those decisions now look faulty. Or at least premature. The Chinese Communist Party may worry about its ability to preserve its control. Otherwise, why would it need to build a surveillance state, to put 1 million Uighurs in “reeducation camps,” to ostracize and imprison human-rights lawyers, or to “disappear” the head of Interpol? But it doesn’t appear to be anywhere near actually losing that control.

One line of argument, advanced by Cortes, among others, is that Trump was the first to understand the challenge China poses. That is, no other politician was able to recognize that a China rising without playing by the rules of the American order would present a systemic challenge. Believing this would require accepting that no other politician saw China thieving intellectual property from U.S. companies, forcing technology transfers, prejudicing state-owned companies, or manipulating its currency to mercantile advantage. But the public record proves that other leading political and economic figures understood the risks: Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign, for example, and President Barack Obama, who set up the 19-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership so that China would get access to those markets only if it played by the new rules.

What is striking about the U.S. debate on China is how little debate there actually is over whether China is a malign force in trade, development, foreign, or domestic policy. China policy would likely have hardened under any American leader because China’s actions have been so egregious that they are undeniable.

A second line of argument is that only Trump could force Chinese compliance to the rules because only he is willing to use the tactics likely to be successful. Variations on the theme include Trump as master negotiator and Trump as either purposeful or inadvertent practitioner of the madman theory of international politics. Peter Navarro, the president’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, put it like this: “The reality is, unless the president talks tough on trade and has possible concrete actions to back up that talk, these people won’t talk to us. They had no incentive to talk to us, none, because they’re winning and we’re losing.”

Peter Beinart: China isn’t cheating on trade

As Phil Levy pointed out a year ago in Forbes, though, the madman approach is productive only if the leader pivots to making reasonable demands once the counterparty comes to the table: “This has been the problem that has plagued Trump trade policy—his erratic behavior has effectively brought lots of countries to the negotiating table, but he has then presented them with equally wild demands that fail to serve U.S. interests.”

Trump is different from his predecessors when it comes to China, in part because he uses tools that are economically riskier than those that more traditional presidents would have chosen. Those tools threaten economic growth and incite stock volatility. Unlike other presidents, Trump doesn’t bother to gather allies and use international institutions such as the WTO or agreements such as the TPP, obvious advantages the United States has in any confrontation with China.