By Plan or Luck, Trump Landed His First Blow on China
Increasing tariffs on Beijing to an absurd amount while giving the allies a 90-day reprieve shored up America’s global leadership, if only for a moment.
Who will blink first?
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski and Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images
With a single Truth, President Donald Trump’s global trade brawl became a US-China cage match. On Wednesday afternoon, Trump announced that he was further elevating sky-high tariffs on China — to 150% — while pausing his commercial assault against nearly everyone else. Furious ex post facto rationalization notwithstanding, the president didn’t get here through shrewd statecraft.
But Trump may have found a winning strategy for the economic cold war against Beijing — if he overcomes the challenges that Chinese retaliation and his own worst instincts pose.