Messing Up, Trump Could Resort To Brinkmanship

2025-04-28 08:13:48

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Back in the White House for the first 100 days, President Donald Trump has more than doubled down on his maverick-ness. He's gone exponential. People think they've grown accustomed to his unpredictability but they keep being taken aback by the dizzying pace of his one move after another. A couple of highlights (or lowlights) have been:

the tariff war he declared on April 2 – a day he dubbed America's“Liberation Day” when he declared a trade war on virtually the rest of the world;
The time, a week after a defiant China's swift tit-for-tat moves had been made, when he went on social media and announced a 90-day moratorium of the tariff impositions, except on China, his hand being forced by crumbling stock market and – more compellingly – a cracking treasury bond market.

China's hardening, meanwhile, keeps taking Washington by surprise. Late last week, the Chinese government's spokesperson contradicted outright Trump's dramatic claims that China was in talks with his administration about their tariff disputes between them and even that Chinese President Xi Jinping“has called” him. Beijing dismissed Trump's claims as“fake news.”

“China refuses to take the bait,” as the New York Times plainly put it on Friday.

The trouble now is that, thanks to Trump's crude statecraft, his administration is placed in an impossible dilemma. That it's not going to win the trade war of epic scale with China is becoming obvious, as the government bond market vulnerability that is America's Achilles Heel was laid bare to the world and as, to cite Adam Posen of Peterson Institute, China has the“escalation dominance .”

On the other hand, there can be no climbdown for the Trump administration without devastating dents being dealt to its creditability and the United States' prestige as the world's sitting superpower.

For China's part, the Rubicon has been crossed and no sporadic and impromptu gesture of softening by Trump will likely change that, certainly not his wide-of-the-mark and counterfactual statements as mentioned above.

How the vibe has shifted in the bilateral relationship! It was in a bygone age when Beijing actively cooperated with Washington to buttress the world's financial order in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street Crisis.

China proceeded to retire its underdog cosplay after the first Trump administration launched a tariff war against it in 2018.

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