Victor Davis Hanson // Nationals Review
President Trump and Secretary Pompeo have worked the U.S. into an advantageous position with a consistent policy toward bad actors.
We are now at a point that even left and right agree that China’s rogue trajectory had to be altered. And while progressive critics of Beijing now are coming out of the woodwork without ever uttering the T-word, nonetheless the subtext is that Trump has pulled back the Chinese curtain and what is exposed is pretty ugly — from reeducation camps and mass incarcerations to cheating Silicon Valley out of billions of dollars in research and development, currency manipulations, bullying allies, and international commercial roguery.
More to the point, the U.S. does not need China as much as it needs us, whether defined as trade and accounts surpluses, intellectual and technological transfers, the strange obsessions with buying U.S. properties or sending a third of a million students into the U.S. In all these areas, there are vast asymmetrical relations. The U.S. can find low-cost assembly plants elsewhere if that is its want, and American investors are not dying to buy Chinese properties or American companies to steal Chinese technological breakthroughs, or California parents to send tens of thousands of their teens to Chinese universities.
