Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Aug 10, 2019 10 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Literally every assertion in this tweet is wrong.
1. The Chinese aren’t actually fretting for a deal. They’re playing it quite tough in fact, counter-tariffing us and running lots of stories about how China won’t be humiliated and succumb to bullying. This is totally unsurprisingly. Nationalism a powerful force,& Trump voters /2
would demand the same were the US in China’s position.

2. There’s no evidence of huge capital flight or that it’s being driven by US tariffs. T’s tariffs are mostly being passed on to US consumers & intermediate suppliers as higher prices. This is pretty well established /3
now, not that Trump cares.

3. China - and Russia & N Korea - all want Trump re-elected. He’s an alliance-wrecking, domestically hugely divisive, ignorant incompetent. That’s why Putin supported him to begin w/. He’s done more to damage US power than anything since Iraq War. END
ADDENDUM:

To those arguing that low inflation means the tariffs are not being passed on to US consumers and suppliers, here's @paulkrugman: nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opi…. One effect of the tariffs I didn't mention was trade diversion (to Vietnam, Mexico, etc.), but that's not /4
relevant to Trump's claim that the tariffs are driving Chinese K flight, nor the unadmitted reality that Americans are paying for the tariffs: princeton.edu/~reddings/pape….

To those arguing that the trade war means China doesn't want Trump re-elected, you are missing the larger /5
picture. Yes, Trump is a pain for China, but any POTUS would be at this point. An anti-Chinese strategic consensus is congealing in Washington: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…. Any other D or R POTUS tough on China like Trump, if not necessarily in the same way. But Trump has the added/6
benefit of crippling US power through: staggering incompetence and shambolic governance; deeply dividing Americans against each other and possibly firing racial or electoral violence next year; undercutting US alliance relationships, including those which help counteract China /7
(Japan, South Korea, Australia); and similarly undercutting international institutions which mirror US values (NATO, the EU, the UN, the TWO, and TPP especially). So yeah, if you're China you'll take another 4 years of Trump, because he's burning down the liberal international /8
order. Trump is a gleeful, agenda-less, wrecking-ball. And every US opponent is hoping he'll win again, while allies are praying desperately he won't: . END

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More from @Robert_E_Kelly

Sep 7, 2025
This whole tangle👇 is such perfect example of Trumpian greed, nativism, and incompetence:

1. Trump wants ‘deals,’ not treaties or law, w/ trade partners

No one knows quite what a deal is, but that’s the whole point. It keeps the terms loose & vague so that Trump can renege.

1
2. Trump doesn’t actually care about the details of SK investment; he just wants to market it as a ‘win’ on Fox

So the S Koreans are stuck with whatever thrown-together ‘framework’ emerges from the disorganized, competing interests within the Trump administration

3. The US

2
visa system has been a mess for decades, and xenophobic MAGA wants it that way

So the SKs don’t know how to get in the needed work-force to operationalize Trump’s deal. They end up getting arrested, bc Trump’s gov't is a disunified, disorganized mess which can't prioritize or

3
Read 4 tweets
Apr 14, 2025
The Trump administration is not acting on the policy suggestions these books make, so I guess they can’t be that important after all.

Both Huntington & Allison recommend America ally with like-minded states against jihadism and China respectively.

Mearsheimer too recommends

1
allies, given how hyper-competitive he sees world politics - especially territorially proximate allies given the stopping power of water.

Yet Trump is wrecking US partnerships for a belligerent unilateralism even neocons wouldn’t advocate.

Next, all three 3 understand that

2
national power is based on economic foundations. None advocates Smoot-Hawley-style tariffs, especially against allies.

Yet that is what Trump is doing.

All argue that world politics is a jungle, but lots of realists argue that. That’s noting new.

If you really want to see

3
Read 4 tweets
Apr 2, 2025
I would qualify this👇: MAGA is an ideology of US decline

- It is explicitly backward-looking for its model (America was great in the past but is not now).

- That past greatness was rooted in a fading economic sector - blue-collar factory work - which no amount of tarriffs

1
will revivify.

- MAGA aches for older social relations - most obviously in its intense dislike of economically independent women - even if it costs the economy.

- It similarly dislikes immigration, despite the obvious economic benefits, particularly entrepeneurialism.

2
- It rejects imports despite the obvious benefits of better quality & lower price from competition.

- It exults small-town and rural America, even though the engine of American GDP growth is cities and regional clusters

- It resents higher education even though that leads to

3
Read 8 tweets
Mar 2, 2025
Trump is NOT a realist. Realism uses national power to serve nat’l interests, without ideological blinders, right?

But Trump:

- pointlessly antagonizes the 2 countries with which we have a land border

- aggressively pursues the factional, ideological interests of Christian

1
fundamentalists in the M East rather than US general interest

- undermines NATO which has kept the peace for 80 years in a core area of US FoPo interest

- believes autocracies like Russia or N Korea are credible counterparties

- rejects alliances which supplement US power

2
& enable US global power projection

- thinks trade wars with allies enhance US power

- is guided in foreign policy by his own ego quirks - loathing for Zelensky & female leaders, admiration for dictators - rather than US national interests

If Trump were a realist, he would

3
Read 8 tweets
Feb 21, 2025
🧵
Most of this is wrong. Let’s go thru it:

1. There is no evidence to substantiate the claim that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine were Trump president

MAGA keeps saying this as if it is self-evident, but given the size & scale of the Russian invasion,plus Putin's long-

1
running, deep-seated hatred for UKR independence, it is hard to believe this whole thing actually turned on a far-away event 16 months earlier: the 2020 US election. Indeed, the belief that the whole world turns on US decisions is a particular American hubris, probably derived

2
from our long-running superpowerdom. But it is not true. Other countries have agency independent of us, especially great powers like RU.

2. Vance and MAGA did not know that UKR had no pathway to victory for the last 3 years

This is lazy retrodiction – using contemporary info

3
Read 13 tweets
Dec 4, 2024
🧵on the S Korean semi-coup

1. This sure looks like a soft or semi-coup, like a SK version of January 6 in the US.

Declaring martial law in response to the gridlock of divided government is just a ridiculous rationale.

And declaring late at night, when half the country is

1
asleep is hugely suspicious.

2. It was remarkably inept. In fact, it looks impulsive, as if Yoon decided this the same day

The declaration targeted the media, opposition, & public political expression. That would require a sweeping move across the country to enforce.Instead

2
the military and police at the legislature gave away to opposition MPs almost immediately.

Yoon seemed to have no plan to deal with the predictable explosion of public protest. SK has a vibrant street protest culture, including militant labor unions. Did he really think the

3
Read 11 tweets

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