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One of the many places there is lack of perspective is what is the purpose of the tariffs? Trump people entered this fight expecting to be one term president. Why does that matter? WTO litigation, if you win after many years only gives you the ability to levy tariffs 1/n
Which you then negotiate with the offending country. China has been known to drag these things out into infinity. Despite Beijing and DC think tank claims China abides by its agreements, everyone not buying CCP propaganda knows they don't. Let's ask Mastercard how their 2/n
WTO agreement to enter China in 2000 and litigation win in 2011 is going. Throw in the Democratic shoulder shrug on China, and the Trump people went fast tariff to focus the mind and set the clock. Make no mistake at all, there are significant risks to the strategy 3/n
Tantamount is keeping the bosses attention and resolve. However, they figured that is a better risk than keeping the US political establishment and voter attention. In other words, they think Trump is a lower risk than DC think tanks to keep the fight going 4/n.
Based upon how compromised major DC think tanks are, that is not a crazy bet. As I've said repeatedly, if you want to challenge China, you can decide which sectors you want to hit but not whether there are major costs. Trump rightfully got major criticism over ZTE 5/n
And should over Huawei if he backs down, but imagine all the think pieces that would have been written if Trump killed ZTE when Beijing retaliated against US businesses about how Trump harmed US businesses. This is truly a major battle. You can decide which costs 6/n
You prefer to accept but to think this issue is going to remotely costless is nothing less than pure fantasy. Done.
