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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.
Iran is similar. Getting out of the Iran Deal and ratcheting up the sanctions remind us not just about what was surrendered when the Obama administration caved in 2015 and resuscitated that odious regime, but that Tehran is increasingly fragile — economically, politically, and socially — and in its fourth decade of bankrupt theocracy cannot survive long-term maximum-pressure strategies, especially vis-à-vis the world largest economy and natural gas and petroleum producer. Had it nuclear weapons as it had planned, the present face-off might have had different consequences.
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See Also:
(1) Iran: New Terrorist Activity in Europe
(2) Trump taps Mark Esper to head Pentagon after Patrick Shanahan bows out
(3) Trump kickoff kicks Democrats’ dangerous obsession with sanctuary cities
(4) America’s First Third-World State
