Critics question effects of Trump’s China deal
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – President Donald Trump’s trade truce with China, announced Saturday during the G-20 summit, may ease skittish investors and lawmakers this week, but experts began to question its potency hours after the president walked back into the White House.
The entente with Beijing, which Trump called “one of the largest deals ever made,” capped a two-day meeting of the world’s largest economies.
“China will be opening up,” the president said after meeting for more than two hours with Chinese President Xi Jinping over grilled sirloin at a Buenos Aires hotel. “And China will be buying massive amounts of product from us.”
White House officials said the deal, outlined in a seven-paragraph statement late Saturday, will involve the United States holding off for 90 days on a round of steep tariffs that had been set for January. In exchange, China will purchase “a not yet agreed upon, but very substantial” amount of U.S. products to “reduce the trade imbalance” that has vexed Trump for decades.
“It remains to be seen what comes out of the 90-day negotiating window, but it is unlikely that China will make dramatic changes to its policy,” said David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “In the end, the administration will have to choose between in- cremental change and ramping up the trade war again.”
Still, the agreement is the first break in the monthslong trade dispute with China and was met with cautious relief by farm-state lawmakers and business groups wary of the tit-for-tat raising of barriers with the nation’s largest trading partner. “The president’s goal to get China in a better and fairer place in trade is the right goal,” Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., told “Fox News Sunday.” “I would like to see China become the market that they should be for us.”
Critics, noting the lack of specificity about what China committed to do, questioned what Trump achieved after upping the ante for months with ever higher tariffs on Chinese exports. Trump said the proposed 25 percent tariffs on roughly $200 billion in Chinese products will be back in play if no deal is reached.
“To this point, the Trump administration trade approach to China has been sound and fury, accomplishing nothing,” said Derek Scissors, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It appears to be a loss for the president. He sets a deadline for tough tariffs, backs off and gets more empty talk.”
“The problem is that he doesn’t understand how to achieve something durable and lasting,” said Michael Desch, director of the Notre Dame International Security Center. “The guy’s got diplomatic attention disorder.”