Always ready with an empty-headed opinion reflecting the inanities of the postmodernist critical theory Mandarin Class indulgences and always with a new book to push (usually just a regurgitation of past cognitive lapses) he is not someone I read with great frequency.
So the headline captured my notice. Reading the article, he is making much the same point I made in The immediate, the tactical and the strategic - you can't play only on one platform; in order to assess Trump's actions with China, you have to understand his goals before you can assess his tactics and strategies. Never-Trumpers tend to jump to the immediate, focusing on the short term costs and tit-for-tats and never assessing that sometimes there are short-term sacrifices in order to achieve long-term and principled gains.
From Friedman.
A U.S. businessman friend of mine who works in China remarked to me recently that Donald Trump is not the American president America deserves, but he sure is the American president China deserves.He then goes on to provide some of the trade history and the reason why we are in the mess we are in. As I said in my post, it was right to go easy on China when it was an undeveloped nation with an agricultural economy; to make it easy for them to reenter the global community. But we are long past that point and China is now a major global economic power with a sophisticated economy, but still taking advantage of all the initial handouts. The global technocrats should have renegotiated China's new roles and responsibilities as China became a much more developed economy, but they never did as long as the costs were only being borne by the middle-class and blue-collar workers.
Trump’s instinct that America needs to rebalance its trade relationship with Beijing — before China gets too big to compromise — is correct. And it took a human wrecking ball like Trump to get China’s attention. But now that we have it, both countries need to recognize just how pivotal this moment is.
Friedman still hates Trump. Presumably he still admires the coercion of the Chinese Communist Party. But he is begrudgingly and snarkily admitting that Trump was right in his diagnosis when Friedman and all the Mandarin Class were wrong.
As a result, all China’s subsidies, protectionism, cheating on trade rules, forced technology transfers and stealing of intellectual property since the 1970s became a much greater threat. If the U.S. and Europe allowed China to continue operating by the same formula that it had used to grow from poverty to compete for all the industries of the future, we’d be crazy. Trump is right about that.But in a stunning example of Mandarin Class Dunning-Krugerism, Friedman criticizes Trump for being wrong about how to fix the problem Friedman himself failed to recognize.
Where he is wrong is that trade is not like war. Unlike war, it can be a win-win proposition. Alibaba, UnionPay, Baidu and Tencent and Google, Amazon, Facebook and Visa can all win at the same time — and they have been. I’m not sure Trump understands that.So Friedman is not sure that Donald "The Art of the Deal" Trump understands that both parties have to win if anyone is to win? That's . . . a brave perspective.
But I’m not sure Xi does, either. We have to let China win fair and square where its companies are better, but it has to be ready to lose fair and square, too. Who can say how much more prosperous Google and Amazon would be today if they had been able to operate as freely in China as Alibaba and Tencent can operate in America?
Pathetic.
Friedman ends with:
For the last decade, though, said James McGregor, one of the most knowledgeable U.S. business consultants in China and a longtime resident there, it’s been clear that Beijing, instead of “reforming and opening, has been reforming and closing.”We had two decades of wonderful development of China as part of the global community with its own people finally becoming better off. And now we have had two decades where that success has been perverted towards repression, regional confrontation, and unilateral and illegal exploitation of the global trading system at everyone else's expense.
Instead of China getting richer and becoming more of a responsible stakeholder in globalization, it was getting richer and militarizing islands in the South China Sea to push the U.S. out. And it was using high-tech tools, like facial recognition, to become more efficient at authoritarian control, not less.
All of this is now coming to a head in these trade talks. Either the U.S. and China find a way to build greater trust — so globalization can continue apace and we can grow together in this new era — or they won’t. In which case, globalization will start to fracture, and we’ll both be poorer for it.
Trump recognized this and set about addressing the problem. Friedman and his ilk failed to acknowledge the problem, praising China's totalitarian policies, all the way up to the point when they could no long ignore the reality. And now Friedman, like all such pundits, having failed and failed, is offering his criticisms of how to solve the problem which he ignored or failed to recognize.
Scott Adams said something prescient in late 2016, before the election, or perhaps right after. I failed to capture it at the time but it was a forecast of how the Mandarin Class would come to view Trump. It was perhaps something like 1) First, they will claim he is an ignorant, madman, barbarian who must be stopped or constrained. 2) They will acknowledge that he is right about the problem but they will claim he is still an ignorant, madman, barbarian when it comes to solving the problem. 3) They will acknowledge that he was right about the problem, and acknowledge that he was right about how to fix the problem, but will focus on the fact that he was careless, or risky, or uncouth about fixing it.
Seems like we are at Stage 2 with some foreshadowing of Stage 3.
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