President
Trump has threatened China’s President Xi that if they don’t meet and
talk at the upcoming G20 meetings in Japan, June 29-30, the United
States will not soften its tariff war and economic sanctions against
Chinese exports and technology.
Some
meeting between Chinese and U.S. leaders will indeed take place, but it
cannot be anything like a real negotiation. Such meetings normally are
planned in advance, by specialized officials working together to prepare
an agreement to be announced by their heads of state. No such
preparation has taken place, or can take place. Mr. Trump doesn’t
delegate authority.
He
opens negotiations with a threat. That costs nothing, and you never know
(or at least, he never knows) whether he can get a freebee. His threat
is that the U.S. can hurt its adversary unless that country agrees to
abide by America’s wish-list. But in this case the list is so
unrealistic that the media are embarrassed to talk about it. The US is
making impossible demands for economic surrender – that no country could
accept. What appears on the surface to be only a trade war is really a
full-fledged Cold War 2.0.
America’s wish list: other countries’ neoliberal subservience
At
stake is whether China will agree to do what Russia did in the 1990s:
put a Yeltsin-like puppet of neoliberal planners in place to shift
control of its economy from its government to the U.S. financial sector
and its planners. So the fight really is over what kind of planning
China and the rest of the world should have: by governments to raise
prosperity, or by the financial sector to extract revenue and impose
austerity...........http://www.unz.com/mhudson/trumps-trade-threats-are-really-cold-war-2-0/
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