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Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

Giving China an ultimatum, "do this or we will stop trading with you," is a surefire way to guarantee that they will not do whatever "this" is.

In the history of the world, trade ultimatums have never worked. For example, the US has issued such ultimatums to pre-ww2 Japan, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea. Needless to say, in none of those cases did the embargoed country alter their behavior in the desired way.

And it is trivial to understand why such ultimatums don't work: they are political suicide to anyone that capitulates. Imagine if China gave such an ultimatum to the US. How popular do you think that would make China with US voters? A candidate campaigning on the platform of "we better just do what China tells us to," would be dead in the water.

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It was the United States that created modern China when we let them in the WTO and gave them most favored nation status. We got nothing in exchange for that, we could have asked for labor and environmental requirements.

What’s your point? None of those things change the fact that trade ultimatums are a diplomatic strategy that always fails.

They do work in the softer case. Canada never would have agreed to a weakened NAFTA without the screws being turned the way they had. Although in this case Trump came very close to a full backlash.

There was collateral, I get milk commercials explaining how the other brand is American, and this one is Canadian. The better one is left for me to decide...

I agree that trade negotiations are a useful and productive diplomatic strategy.

I would argue however that there is a night and day difference between threatening to raise tariffs unless some trade concessions are made (as was the case with Canada) and threatening total embargoe if the other country does not perform some unrelated action (like kill their nuclear weapons program or cut their CO2 or whatever).

The optics of the first is totally fine; it’s just negotiation. You expect the car salesman to try to push the price higher, he expects you to push it lower, it’s how the game works. It’s politically workable.

The latter is more like a boss telling their employee “you must convert to my religion or I’ll fire you.” Because you aren’t asking for trade concessions, it’s much more sensitive and politically unworkable.

Op suggested raising tarrifs. You were the first to speak of an embargo.

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