Friday, March 23, 2018
Experts who get it right? Is the world about to end?
Deutsche Welle is reliably Sorosian, so their headline on Trump's weak answer to China's long trade war is Sorosian:
Did Donald Trump really just launch a trade war with China?
Amazingly the article answers NO!
DW quotes two EXPERTS. Both of them have the FACTS exactly right, both of them draw rational CONCLUSIONS from the facts.
Despite the two CORRECT experts, the article's author still manages to describe the CORRECTNESS wrongly:
While both scholars are on the same page that the US president just launched a trade war, they disagree over whether such a move is necessary and useful to counter what are widely seen as unfair trade practices in areas such as intellectual property rights and market access.Well, do both agree that Trump launched a trade war? One expert:
Lewis said punishing Beijing for its continuous trade transgressions by imposing massive tariffs is "something that has been overdue" for years. Chinese economic espionage, he said, has cost the US tens of billions of dollars every year for the last 20 years. But because China was a smaller economy, people just considered this loss as the price of doing business with Beijing.The other expert:
China scholar Wedeman agreed that Beijing's transgressions on intellectual property issues have been a vexing and an unresolved issue for the US for decades. But he doubted that Trump's tariff move is the best way to remedy Washington's legitimate grievances. "Trying to use tariffs as way of dealing with that problem is like using a sledgehammer when a scalpel is more appropriate," he said.In fact both experts agree that China has been waging a "trade war" for decades, and both are unsure whether Trump's specific response is the best. Exactly right on the facts, justified in doubting Trump's intelligence and sincerity. ¶ 1:52 AM
