CNN’s Zakaria says Trump’s tariffs help China, not US

KARACHI: In a conversation on CNN, Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria criticised the Trump administration’s tariff war with China as a strategic blunder, arguing that by escalating economic hostilities without a plan, the US has handed China’s hardliners the very decoupling from the American economy they have long sought — potentially raising the stakes for a conflict over Taiwan.

Talking to Erin Burnett on CNN on Saturday, Zakaria said that the stakes are high in the current tariffs situation with China and the Trump administration “has badly bungled this”.

Explaining further, he said that “the greatest deterrent to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan...was not any weapon we had” but the fear China had that “they would be decoupled from the American economy, the economy with which they had, for the last forty years, built a deep interdependent relationship”.

Adding that “Trump has fired that gun pointlessly without a plan”, Zakaria said that the tariffs on China were raised to 145 per cent “simply because [Trump wanted to save face” and needed to turn China into his “punching bag”. This, per the journalist, has led to Trump playing right into China’s hardliners’ hands who he says have been waiting for this decoupling and will now say “Look. If we go into Taiwan, what do we have to lose? We’ve already been cut off from the American market”.

During the conversation with Zakaria, CNN”s Burnett showed a social media post -- with more than 13 million views -- by China’s foreign ministry with Mao’s photo with the caption: ‘We’ll Never Yield’. The photo is of Mao speaking during the Korean War era. Burnett pointed out that that was the last time that China and America were actually at physical war.

In response, Zakaria said that every school child in China is taught about the beginning of China’s modern history in that “China was forced and humiliated by Western powers, including the US, in the nineteenth century and had to back down and had to accept humiliation and a kind of neocolonial arrangement with the foreign powers. And the message is: never yield like that again.”

The Chinese have a fairly strong hand, per Zakaria who also said that the US imports “core things” from China like computer chips: “ I think I saw one number that said 60 per cent of the chips we import are Chinese chips. We need that stuff. It’s not gonna be easy to find it somewhere else.” On the other hand, Zakaria said, the Chinese can opt for other places to import material they get from the US -- like agriculture, soybean etc. He also pointed out that the political systems of the two countries would also lead to different approaches: China being a “dictatorship” and the US emphasising public opinion.

Speaking of Trump’s America, Zakaria called it a “very sad moment”, adding that “as a kid coming to coming to America, America was the city on the hill, the shining example of how a modern economy should work. You have a market. You have rules. You have laws. You know, everybody plays by them. It doesn’t matter whether you know the prime minister, the president, a senator. What was important was the merit. And now when you look at the orgy of corruption that is going to be unleashed, we have studies already from the first Trump term.”

In essence, said Zakaria, “This is an economy where political favour, knowing people, has become the key -- not the market, which was the glory of the American economy.”