Thread by @geoffreygertz

Great thread here by @Brad_Setser trying to puzzle out Trump’s trade strategy. (TL;DR – escalating at this point doesn’t give Trump much leverage, and China knows it.)

One additional puzzle from me: where are all the national security voices on this? (1/x)

https://twitter.com/Brad_Setser/status/1166179055898640386

@Brad_Setser DC is full of debates on rethinking China, ‘the new China consensus’, whether or not there actually *is* a consensus, rival “open letters”, etc. But this discussion is, for the most part, carrying on separately from current US-China trade tensions. (2/)

@Brad_Setser Meanwhile, Trump admin seems to fully buy in to hawkish national security views of China (it’s in the national security strategy, talk of ‘clash of civilizations’, etc.) But we haven’t heard much from those quarters on the current trade war. (3/)

@Brad_Setser On trade, the Trump admin talks a lot about how China is cheating and taking advantage of us. But not a lot about how this fits into a grand strategy of great power competition. (4/)

@Brad_Setser Does the Trump admin think economic interdependence with China is a strategic liability? Does it want to see decoupling? If so, it should say so! Because that might actually convince American firms to reconfigure supply chains, rather than just waiting out a tariff spat. (5/)

@Brad_Setser So while, as @Brad_Setser argues, the economic strategy hasn’t been clearly articulated, neither has the foreign policy / national security strategy. Maybe there’s a lot going on behind the scenes we don’t see, but hard to figure out a coherent strategy. (6/)

@Brad_Setser And at some point USG will need to publicly articulate a China strategy, especially if it expects the public to bear costs. (And there will be costs.) (7/)

@Brad_Setser Currently, at a very basic level, it is unclear to me if the goal of the trade war is to get China to open up its market and increase interdependence between the two countries, or the opposite of that. Which is … not a great way to fight a war! (8/end)