Mike Whitney on Trump's trade war with China

One of the oddities of the tariffs dust-up, was the fact that the Trump team never anticipated China’s retaliatory response.  It’s actually amazing.  The administration lives in such an information bubble that they thought China would cave in after their comical “Liberation Day” announcement.  What were they thinking? 

We know what Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent was thinking because he made a number of public statements that the US had an edge on China because ‘we were the deficit country.’  Here’s what he said in an interview on CNBC: 

“We are the deficit country.  They sell almost five times more goods to us than we sell to them.  So, the onus will be on them to take off these tariffs.  They’re unsustainable for them.”  He cited estimates that China could lose 5-10 million jobs if tariffs persist, highlighting China’s economic vulnerability. 

This is idiocy.  This is like saying that the ragamuffin panhandler on the street-corner has the advantage over the flush businessman with millions in the bank.  The US is $36 trillion in debt while China has a $3 trillion surplus!  How does ‘being broke’ give us ‘the advantage’.  We’re lucky that China still accepts our currency at all, and yet, our Treasury Secretary thinks that being destitute gives us the “upper hand”.  A man like this should not be Treasury Secretary.

~ Mike Whitney, "Re-thinking U.S.-China Relations After the Tariffs Shipwreck," The Unz Review, May 20, 2025