What the TrumpXi dinner could yield
USCHINA TENSIONS Spotlight is on the two world leaders as they face each other on a global platform in the middle of a gripping trade war BUENOSAIRES:
Whatever happens in Buenos Aires when US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping dine on Saturday night, the trade wars are set to be with us well into 2019 and possibly beyond.
There’s a good reason talk swirls about the world slipping into a new Cold War. Power politics are alive and well. And the issues between the world’s two largest economies are too complex and longstanding to be solved in a few hours.
That doesn’t mean a ceasefire isn’t possible. Based on conversations with officials on both sides and analysts familiar with the discussions, this is what the best-case scenario looks like.
STABILISING THE RELATIONSHIP
Trump has in his 22 months in office succeeded in disrupting the globe’s most important economic partnership and befuddling Chinese officials. Yet Chinese officials privately say they have learnt that Trump reflects more than a passing phase in the relationship.
They are right. In Washington there is a rare consensus among Democrats and Republicans as well as current and former national security and economic policymakers that China has become a bad actor and that it needs to be confronted.
But on both sides of the Pacific concerns also remain about the consequences of an all-out economic war as reflected in nervy financial markets. Both the U.S. and China therefore have reason to seek at least a pause in their conflict. Chinese officials say their priority is finding a way to stabilise the relationship and drawing the US back into the structured dialogue that allowed both sides to manage past differences. The Trump-Xi dinner is their best opportunity to do that. A ceasefire is the first step.
TARIFFS AND SOYBEANS
Trump’s administration has seized on tariffs as a favored tool. “I happen to be a tariff person because I’m a smart person, okay?” the president told the Wall Street Journal this week.
Trump also has demonstrated a penchant for truces, however.
When European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker visited the White House in July he won a break that helped the EU fend off auto tariffs. Likewise, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe extracted from Trump a moratorium on those same auto tariffs as a condition for entering trade negotiations that, as with the EU, aren’t set to begin in earnest until 2019.
That is why many analysts believe the best -- and most realistic -- potential result of Saturday’s dinner will be a ceasefire featuring a pause in any new tariffs.
The Trump administration has imposed duties on $250 billion in imports from China so far. On January 1 the 10 percent tariff on $200 billion of that total is due to rise to 25 percent. So one goodwill gesture would be to delay that escalation while talks proceed, a move that would be welcomed by US companies concerned about trade war.
Trump has also threatened to impose import duties on the remaining commerce with China, which he could also suspend.
Any such moves would, however, require Chinese concessions. One obvious one: The removal of the retaliatory tariffs China imposed on American soybeans, which hit harvests from Trump-supporting states such as Iowa and North Dakota.
A FROZEN CONFLICT
Since the beginning of their assault on China, Trump officials have scorned the way past American presidents were drawn into prolonged dialogues with Beijing that went nowhere. “The game that China has played - and they played people in the Bush administration like a violin - is to do the tap dance of economic dialogue,” Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s most hawkish trade advisers, said in a Nov. 13 speech in which he mocked even some of the Trump administra- tion’s early negotiations with China, including one that yielded a promise to buy more American beef that never delivered. “Where’s the beef?”
But if the best result for Trump’s dinner with Xi is a ceasefire, the most awkward component is it would trigger a prolonged conversation that may go nowhere and mark a repeat of the very same pattern that Navarro ridiculed.
Any final armistice in the trade wars will thus be difficult to reach.
German authorities are investigating possible sabotage of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s plane after pilots cut short her trip to the Group of 20 summit in Argentina due to an electronics failure.
A government official said investigators are looking at all possible causes following a German media report that the incident is being examined as a possible criminal act.
The Airbus A340 experienced difficulties southwest of Amsterdam on Thursday, less than an hour into the flight from Berlin. A routine inspection suggests a technical malfunction of the plane’s air-to-ground communications systems, a German Air Force spokesman in Berlin said by phone.
At this point, there’s no immediate evidence of a crime, he told reporters.
The pilots dumped fuel, but even so the plane touched down in Cologne with a heavy load for a trans-Atlantic flight. News portal Spiegel Online reported the plane suffered a complete failure of its communication system that left the crew without contact with ground control.
The German leader planned to fly to Madrid on Friday and from there she would take a commercial flight to Argentina, accompanied by finance minister Olaf Scholz and a small delegation, according to an official.
The mediapersons who had been travelling with her will remain in Germany.
BERLIN: