Why Trump is scrambling for allies in his trade war with China

[signalmankenneth]

Trump has burned down the bridges with our allies, and they no longer trust America either?!!

CNN —
Does America want its friends back?

After three months of insulting, tariffing and even threatening to annex some of its best allies, the Trump administration suddenly needs some help.

The US President has now escalated a full-on trade clash with China that he doesn’t seem to know how to win. So the administration is rushing to work out how to build leverage against Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is in no mood to cede to Trump’s bullying.

But there’s one thing that might work. It would bring to bear America’s strength and global power and could perhaps build pressure on Beijing to act on consistent US complaints about market access, theft of intellectual property, industrial espionage and other issues. There’s only one problem: This approach would conflict with Trump’s “America first” mantra.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pointed out on Fox Business this week that US allies such as Japan, South Korea and India would soon be in trade talks with Washington, as would Vietnam.

“Everyone is coming to the table, and basically China is surrounded,” he said. Bessent added that a topic of talks should be a joint goal: “How do we get China to rebalance? That is the big win here.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked on Friday why American allies would help it counter China when Trump was treating friends and foes alike. She replied: “You’ll have to talk to our allies who are reaching out to us. The phones are ringing off of the hooks. They have made it very clear they need the United States of America, they need our markets, they need our consumer base.”

But everything that Trump has done since he arrived back in the Oval Office has been designed to destroy groups of like-minded democracies. Several times this week, he dissed the European Union. “I always say it was formed to really do damage to the United States in trade,” he said.

He’s not the only Europe hater. Vice President JD Vance revealed his distaste for the continent at the Munich Security forum and also in a group chat of officials about air strikes in Yemen.

Trump’s spite in the Western hemisphere is also an issue.

A unified North American trading powerhouse has long been seen as a potential bulwark against China. But Trump has repeatedly threatened to take over Canada and has targeted Mexico with some of his toughest tariffs. New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has warned that his country’s traditional relationship with Washington is over.

Still, the idea of building an allied front to try to modify China’s trade practices is such a good idea, it’s a wonder no one thought of it before.

They did. And Trump shut it down.

On the first day of his first term in 2017, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a group of 12 nations including allies like Mexico, Canada, Japan, and Australia, as well as Japan that did not include China. The president also shut down a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership that would have linked the world’s two largest markets.

The question now is whether Trump has so alienated America’s friends that they won’t take his calls.

“The US right now is an incredibly unreliable partner to anyone in the world, and I don’t know how we are going to get back to being reliable,” Jason Furman, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration, told CNN on Thursday.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/11/americas/trump-china-trade-war-allies-intl-latam/index.html

CHINA HAS EATEN ENOUGH DOLLARS​

 

[Hawkeye10]

Arnaud Bertrand

@RnaudBertrand
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I unironically believe this is true, and I've been saying so for years. The US, and much of the West, with people like Gordon Chang and frankly the large majority of "China experts" out there, have promoted a narrative on China that bears close to no relation with reality.That doesn't hurt China, it hurts the West.Trump's recent escalation of tariffs is but the latest example of this, and we actually know he listened to none other than Gordon Chang because he directly quoted him last week in a social media post.Trump is acting out of the false belief, repeated non-stop on Fox News and various U.S. media, that China is extremely dependent on exports, especially to the U.S., but it's simply not true.And even if their economy was indeed dependent on U.S. exports, the foundation of the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China isn't, as many wrongly believe, the economy, but the end of the century of humiliation. Mao's first words at the founding political assembly of the PRC in 1949 weren't about economic growth, but rather: "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up."So the notion that Trump can bring China into submission by doing exactly this—insulting and humiliating them—based on the calculation that they'll prioritize money over national dignity, is extraordinarily misguided.To the Chinese, the reference everyone has in mind here is the Opium War, a time that bears striking resemblance to today's context. Back then too, China had a large trade surplus with the West, the British Empire first and foremost.The British, frustrated by the trade deficit, responded by forcing opium into Chinese markets—effectively using economic warfare to 'correct' the trade imbalance, much like Trump is trying to do now.The Qing dynasty was weak and Britain won the Opium Wars, resulting in the 'unequal treaties' that became symbols of national humiliation. Ultimately it is this very context that enabled the Communist Party to grab power, and their entire founding narrative centers on never again allowing such treatment.So if Trump wants to make a "deal" with China, the very last thing he should do is replay the historical script of Western powers attempting to dictate terms through economic warfare. China will obviously choose resistance over capitulation—even if the economic costs were to be absolutely enormous (and again in this case they wouldn't be).A more effective approach would be to acknowledge China as an equal partner and focus on specific concerns in a respectful way, rather than attempting to force submission through unilateral bullying moves that not only are sure to achieve nothing, but are even wholly counter-productive.There you go, very concretely, on the necessity of genuinely understanding who you're dealing with. The narratives promoted by the likes of Gordon Chang doesn't create leverage against China—it simply creates policy failures for America.

 

[Cypress]

You won't keep allies very long with hubris and insult.