The US has no China policy

Everything, it seems, is now a bargaining chip, as the Trump administration keeps reversing itself

- ANDREAS KLUTH

As the presidents of the United States and China prepare to meet on the sidelines of an economic summit in South Korea — an encounter that may not actually happen — some foreign-policy strategists in Washington are not just worried but aghast.

The two mightiest nations on Earth seem hellbent on waging economic war up to and including “mutual assured destruction.” And at least one of the pair seems to have no plan, no expertise and no clue.

“The first thing to understand is that there is no China policy” in the current US administration, Rebecca Lissner told me. She was a top adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris and would now be in the National Security Council if Ms Harris had won the 2024 election.

The Trump administration has no coherent strategy towards China, and the “trade stuff is worse than the markets believe,” I heard from Zack Cooper, a veteran Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute. That must be bad indeed, because the stock markets have been seesawing since April. One of his colleagues despairs over “nine months of policy whiplash” and a chronic case of “strategic schizophrenia.”

Attempting to summarise the chaos so far runs into the same limits of encapsulating, say, the story twists in Game of Thrones in one sentence. Roughly: Earlier this year, Donald Trump declared economic war on most of the world. Almost all countries sued for peace, but the most powerful, China, stared him down, matching tariffs on the way up (peaking at 145 per cent at one point) and on the way down (hovering around 30 per cent for a while). A few reversals, pauses and feints later, a new round of spikes is threatened for November.