BACK in the 2016 United States presidential election, Donald Trump talked about the US trade deficit with China, and how he would implement trade protection to keep American jobs safe. Those words eventually became policy, albeit in a limited way.
However, there is some confusion about the trade war. There is some belief that the Americans feared China, and that the trade war was a manifestation of that.
The real reason is that the Americans wanted their manufacturing sector back. American jobs and factories were shipped overseas to China because of lower costs.
So when Trump talked about nationalist policies, he was referring to that, not out of any inherent aggression against the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
This is also true for American technology. Trump voters wanted American tech and American manufacturing to be done in America, not China (or India or any other country). That was why Trump was, and is, considered a nationalist candidate. He opposes America the Empire in favor of America the Nation, which wants to stay away from the world (and, to be honest, for the world to stay away from it).
The impetus for the trade war was not about preventing China from making electric vehicles (EVs), semiconductors or artificial intelligence of their own. It’s about not letting them (and any other country) do it with American jobs, American tech and American factories.
So news of China making their own EVs and semiconductor is irrelevant, because what American voters (or at least the Trump supporting segment) want is to detach the US from the global system their elites helped create in the first place.
The problem for the US is that a lot of countries don’t actually want a protectionist America that decouples itself from the world, and this includes China. For all the rhetoric, a lot of power centers want to engage with the US. They just want to engage on their terms./PN
