The fierce tariff offensive with which Donald Trump wants to discipline China has less to do with his desire to help American workers who have been harmed by deindustrialization that with geopolitical reality. As a president of the prevailing hegemonic power, the “orange man” is forced to react to the emergence of a rival who, in the opinion of his nominally communist leaders and many others, is destined to replace it. For understandable reasons, Trump does not want to be remembered as a president who was too weak to defend the world’s world supremacy, and collective self -esteem that accompanies him, but it would seem that he does not understand that his truculent style and his refusal to distinguish between faithful allies and enemies are weakening their own country.
While Barack Obama, Joe Biden and other predecessors of Trump shared his concern about what was happening on the international stage, gave the impression of having resigned to, sooner or later, the economy of the “Asian giant” would far exceed the American, since to do so it would only have to become a little more productive than those of Argentina and other relatively poor countries. However, while Obama and Biden just asked the Chinese to respect the order based on rules that the United States had reflected and that so many benefits had provided, Trump and his relatives have assumed a position that is decidedly more aggressive, hence the virtual commercial embargo, with 145%rates, which have just applied to their main competitor.
For many Americans, the one that their own country is the most powerful and, when it is the richer product, the richer is perfectly normal. They do not attribute it to their continental dimensions, the great oceans who separated it from dangerous predators such as Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, or that today has at least five times more inhabitants than any power of Western Europe, but to allegedly congenital dynamism of its inhabitants that compare with the lethargy that in their judgment is typical of others. It is a conviction that, through the millennia, has been characteristic of peoples who enjoy an hour of splendor before being surpassed by others more willing to sacrifice.
In this area, the theories of the great Tunisian thinker Ibn Jaldún have not lost their validity, which, in the fourteenth century, said that the civilizations that are lax begin to sleep over their laurels and therefore contain the seeds of their own destruction in the hands of less sophisticated people. Lately, the evils alluded to Ibn Jaldún have become painfully evident in almost all Western societies, including, of course, in that of the United States.
While Trump is believed to remedy such evils, judging by his behavior is only an alarming symptom of some of the most serious. He wanted to change the globalized economic system, but almost immediately he had to go back to realize that the US economy could not be isolated from the international without paying bulky costs. Bad that despite the magnate who has proposed to remodel the world, not even in a power as great as the United States would work well the autarchy to which he aspires and that he claims in frayed speeches overflowing with self -pity in which he says that, for more than a century, Americans have been victims of others.
Almost always, the transition between the hegemony of a powerful state and another has been extremely violent. Although the most recent, in which the British Empire yielded to the United States, a country that had generated and with which it continued to have much in common, was not a consequence of a war between the two, it was an exception. Would the eventual replacement of the United States as a governing superpotion for China be equally peaceful? While the fear of what would happen if a nuclear war exploded makes the protagonists in this drama move cautiously, in East Asia there abounds those that give for discounted that China soon chooses to solve Manu Militi the problem caused by the independence of Taiwan, which is why Japan, Australia, the Philippines and other neighbors are preparing to face what they see what they see.
Is it inevitable that China economically exceeds not only to the United States but also to the west as a whole, more Japan and South Korea? It would be if the inhabitants of the Popular Republic managed to emulate the economically successful Chinese of Singapore overseas and, until recently, those of Hong Kong, but there are many reasons to take doubts about their ability to do so. Those who say that the Chinese economy has already fallen into “the median entry trap” that afflicts countries that, after experiencing a fast growth stage, cannot advance much more, cannot be made, but it is evident that, for frustration of the autocratic and extremely ambitious president Xi Jinping, the difficulties continue to pile up.
From the point of view of the Chinese regime, the demographic panorama is much more alarming than the economic one. The official figure for the birth rate is 1.18 children per woman, just half of the necessary to maintain the current population, which is decreasing year after year, but there are those that believe that, as is often the case in authoritarian countries, those in charge of estimating it have moved away from the truth and that, especially in the most developed areas, the authentic rate is resembled to that of South Korea, where it is 0.78 lower on the planet.
Thus, unless there are great changes very soon, China is awaited with a demographic catastrophe that will cause countless internal problems and will put an abrupt end to the dream that the medium empire will be erected in the most powerful and most influential state in the world. Soon, China will have to face the consequences of population aging. It is expected that in 2040 26 percent will be more than 60 years; Because the social welfare system is so precarious, middle -class Chinese are reluctant to consume because they need to save their money to reduce the risk of falling into the most absolute misery when they stop working.
To make the perspectives against China even more gloomy, due to the policy of the only child that was abandoned in 2015, and the patriarchal traditions of society, there is a colossal surplus of “leftover” men who can never marry. It would seem that there are already at least 30 million “inces”, involuntary celibates in power, which can only believe themselves betrayed by the generation that in their opinion was responsible for creating the situation that is good in which they are found. For a regime that privileges social control, preventing the resentment that so many will serve to cause large -scale rebellions, such as those that have occurred over and over again in China by losing the emperor on duty “the mandate of heaven”, it must be an absolute priority. It is for this reason that XI is stirring the strong nationalist passions of youth in order to persuade her that her misfortunes are due to external enemies.
Needless to say, in this company, Trump’s bellicose behavior and vice president JDVANCE are convenient. By making China the target of a ruthless commercial war, they are helping XI and company that, to anyone’s surprise, have been proclaimed resolved to “fight until the end” against the United States. They imply that they trust to win because, in the short term, the most harmed by tariffs will be American consumers whose standard of living depends in part to the availability of goods at accessible prices produced in China and other countries in which labor costs less than in the United States.
Trump, aware that it would not be convenient to deprive his compatriots of Apple’s iPhone, computers and other relatively cheap electronic admini to which they have become accustomed, the tariffs are already making tariffs more selective in an effort to reassure those concerned about the concrete consequences of what he is doing.
China’s ultra -grape growth owed a lot to the will of Western entrepreneurs, headed by Americans, to take advantage of the human capital of a people who have always been famous for their work culture and their dedication to study. From Mao’s Calamite management, a very brief period made a very poor country a huge factory. But, of course, the Chinese did not settle for playing a subaltern role in the world economy. Very soon, they learned enough and not having to depend so much on foreign intellectual contributions. However, the consensus is that China is not yet in a position to completely dispense with the technology and financial institutions of others, so that it will not be as easy, as XI seems to believe, ensure that from now on the economy of their country, whose dimensions are comparable with those held by the American -which, let’s not forget, it works with a population that is more than four times lower -, it is driven by internal consumption.
