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I think it was obvious when they used national security concerns to put tariffs on aluminum and steel from Canada.

I can kind of understand it if you consider having a stable, strong steel and aluminum industry a national security issue.

Say Canada pulls an Uber and just drives all US forges out of business with Uber cheap metals. Though I doubt we have thay much production capacity to actually put the US at risk.

What gets me is the hypocrisy of the US. If it's a US industry/company under threat then it's a national security issue. If a foreign country has any protectionist policies, then they're communists and subject to sanctions and/or invasion and/or having their government toppled.

I guess it's pretty straightforwardly self-serving, but surely all the other countries' economy's who get carelessly trashed constitute a bigger national security issue!

They do it because the people who vote for them eat it up. Politics is basically the "science" of hypocrisy. All you need is an easily impressionable audience, ideally with plenty of preconceived notions.

https://i.redd.it/gye28fevde011.jpg

I think the mistake you're making is that the protectionist policies of (say) the US and China are not remotely comparable. In particular, the whole reason the US needs steel and aluminium tariffs is that China has used protectionism and state subsidies to build a steel and aluminium industry so far in excess of what the country consumes that the surplus has tanked global prices. This is pretty much unprecidented. The US is not the only country that objects to this; the EU wanted to put tariffs on China a few years earlier but they couldn't agree on which goods the tariffs should apply to.

Even if Canada is not likely to become an enemy, their metal industry could dissipate due to any number of other causes (just like how ours has dissipated). It's like using software dependencies - in the long term it can be better to cultivate your in-house engineers and their packages even when popular well-maintained libraries are out there.

If protectionism is good, then why did the world move away from it when it did?

I ask this question in good faith: global trade definitely has its downsides, but one positive aspect it has is that reduces the probability of armed conflict taking place between countries trading with one another. All else being equal, waging war on a customer deprives one of their business, and waging war on a supplier deprives one of that source of supplies.

To your point, cultivating your in-house engineers on a given project means that those engineers are tied up in that endeavour as opposed to working on something that has a higher return on investment.

I have seen critics of the administration saying that it was stupid to get angry at China because of the trade balance. That there were legitimate causes to get angry though: IP legislation and spying.

I may be an attempt at making a decent case, but yeah, the bullying rhetoric muddy this issue.

And that's really a dangerous slope for US to go in. If they make spying on their neighbors a criterion to impose tarrifs, I am sure Europe would be happy to push some obligations on the GAFA

Two things. First, military security is entirely dependent on economic security. The productive capacity of a country's economy places a hard upper limit on its ability to produce materiel and thus effectively wage war. For obvious reasons trade can't be relied on when at war with the former trading partner.

Second, this administration has been promising a trade war with China since before the election. It's not as if this is some kind of surprise. "CHYNA!" was a major campaign issue.

For background: in the Nixon era, the USA decided that it would start a Marshall plan style trade deficit funded "investment" in China, with the belief that increasing the economic prosperity of the PRC would lead it to greater openness and generally becoming a tame satrapy of the US empire, much as Germany and Japan did. Now that it's clear that plan was a complete failure and the Chinese played the Americans for fools, some Americans, most notable among them the President, are looking to reset to a less inequitable trade relationship. Pretty much all major economic and political news from the pacific region is a consequence of this process. The Hong Kong riots? Turns out the CIA is involved[1]. North Korean missile launches? Yeah, how much real autonomy does the DPRK have when China decides to call shots?

Edit: [1] https://www.reuters.com/video/2019/08/08/us-calls-china-thug... (Obviously this is a pro-US outlet and frames it as innocuously as possible, but anyone who knows anything about tradecraft knows that "diplomat" in this context is a polite word for operative).

"The Hong Kong riots? Turns out the CIA is involved."

I would be very interested in seeing any credible evidence that 'the CIA is involved' in the current Hong Kong protests.

And I don't mean HKHermit scratching his stomach, or the hilarious training manual for non-verbal battle communications...

Well, generally speaking, this is exactly the ballpark CIA feels very much at home at and has tons of experience doing exactly this, for last 70+ years.

On the other hand, Chinese involvement would also make sense, but things are too obviously pointing to their direction for my subjective taste.

Maybe its both - US escalating situation just because that's what 3-letter agencies do, China obviously deeply involved since its a crucial place for them and literally their territory, which is rebelling and questioning Chinese supremacy. At the end, these are all just constant games for these folks.

I know you didn't make the original comment, but I'm going to put this one down as "stated as fact, no actual evidence"...

In the Chinese media I've read about this, the CIA usually isn't accused directly. Rather, they cite a Washington Post article [1] where Allen Weinstein, co-founder of the National Endowment for Democracy, says "a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." Then they argue that the NED's funding of various political groups in Hong Kong [2] is essentially a CIA operation.

Personally, I think that's a lazy argument trying to link the CIA (known bad) to the NED (therefore also bad). On the other hand, it does mean that US government organizations are picking favorites to provide with funding in order to influence the politics of foreign countries.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/22/i...

[2] https://www.ned.org/region/asia/hong-kong-china-2018/

Lol, it's China that caused the riots.

That should be clear by now :p

US & UK intelligence have a long record of actively creating discord where there would be none for economic/political gain.

To act like this is not the case, is to ignore well documented history.

I'm somewhat surprised this is confusing? The Executive is in charge of matters of national security, and thus is to use whatever is at its disposal to secure the nation.

Why wouldn't you expect economic restrictions in national conflicts where we've agreed not to invade over such things?

That's not what grandparent is saying. The argument is that instead of saying "we're delaying Huawei licenses in response to tariffs" they keep up the charade that it's something to do with security.

I think the reason for this might have to do with denying the thing in front of a wto panel.

Well, I mean, if we suspect Huawei is spying on us, then changed tariffs on soybeans don't change that, right?

The free-trade consensus has been dead for a while. We're only just starting to see the effects now because of how slow global politics moves. I figured the end was nigh when bipartisan efforts killed both the TPP and the TTIP. The political system in the US is no longer in favor of free trade.

I say this as someone who is generally pro China, in context of US hegemony and great powers security competition, Trump is fucking up hard by conflating security concerns with trade concerns. It's vexing a lot of people on the hill. The cost benefit analysis of cheap Huawei hardware is favorable for many countries, but US is not one of them. Smacking nuclear sanction arresting Meng is the kind of calculus that appeals to his base that would rather see blood than sensible policy.

> this doesn't sound like a decision based on national security concerns, right?

Do you also think that most of the troubling places that the US had to invade had, by coincidence, lots of oil in them?

I believe that loosening up the restrictions on Huawei was one of the things China demanded in order to stop blocking purchases of US farm goods, and that's what ties the two together.

I've said before and I'll say it again. Trump has no interest in settling the trade war with China any time soon. He is forcing companies out of China, and once China realizes this and tries to correct it, it will be too expensive for those companies to want to return.

This will be viewed in posterity as the fastest cold war ever won against a Communist country.