MelianPretext

It's pretty wild that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs is quoting Mao to hit back at the US tariffs. It really underscores what a huge mistake it was when Khrushchev, that "poison dwarf skinhead fuck" tore down Stalin's legacy. You can almost hear all the Western "Sinologist" academics losing their minds right now, shouting, "No, you can’t quote Mao! You’re supposed to be just as ashamed of him as we made the Soviets feel about Stalin! Mao’s supposed to be an ideological weapon we use against you, not something you wield against us! Are all my Ivy League/Oxbridge-published University Press anti-Mao books for nothing?"

Yikes. You first responded to my whole post by starting off with a blunt "Broadly disagree." Nothing wrong with that, in of itself, but in the light of your further response, that seemed intended more as a dismissal of my original post than an invitation for conversation, so it's unfair to call others "pompous redacted-heads" given that initial approach.

The issue here is that we’re speaking on completely different registers. I can’t just accept the reductive view of Trump as that would invalidate the entire materialist analysis of him and the threat he poses to the Global South through his role in leading the U.S. empire. That’s why I pointed out the elephant in the room—because it’s not about personal attacks, but about the framework we’re working within. You seem to approach this from the perspective that Trump is just an incompetent buffoon, which is a viewpoint often pushed in spaces like r/politics. Not a criticism, just an observation. But my approach is intended to be a materialist view, where I see him as representing the class interests of his backers, while also helming a global empire with immense military, financial, and nuclear power.

To be clear, you might be entirely right in your own view, but leftists once thought the same thing about figures like Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Biden. Sure, they were often seen as incompetent or buffoonish on a personal level, but they still helmed the U.S. empire. That power allowed them to do enormous damage to the rest of the world, and other nations simply cannot afford to dismiss U.S. leadership, in a world still gripped by US hegemony, as just the actions of a hapless fool. A materialist analysis, even if it means giving them a bit of credit, is the best way to assess the possible latitudes of their capabilities and potential for harm.

Well, I believe you're interrogating my comment from that r/politics interpretation of his administration which makes any materialist analysis a pointless non-sequitur. I won't be sharing that characterization so we'd be talking past each other.

I'll respond to some points though. The expectation of any real opposition from countries like Canada, vassal settler states, is honestly laughable. They'll ride out the storm for this term, just as they did during Trump I, and then line up to kiss the ring of the next Democrat presidency. Yes, their sympathies towards America is likely once again shaken, the poor heartbroken sods, but the real material factor is their allegiance towards Western hegemony (and white racial and cultural supremacy, to put it even more frankly), which is unshakeable.

As for Sheinbaum, she's walking on a daily tightrope of avoiding being painted alongside Morena as "uncooperative socialists" by the US media apparatus that would trigger US attempts to pull another Chile by some gusano freak like Rubio. The idea that Mexico, America's direct south, is governed by anyone even a nudge more left and assertive than a comprador reactionary like Pinochet has been deeply grating for the American political class (and the West, given how rags like The Economist have rubbished her). I don't like to overplay the capabilities of the Global South because it obscures the danger that the US empire poses fundamentally poses, as seen from the Gaza genocide.

Tariffing all countries was essential to his logic of how restoring American manufacturing would occur, it's not a bug but a feature. That plan might be shite but it is absolutely intentional done from Trump's calculus. The important part of my analysis was that this concessional "pause" is a spanner in the works of his own plan. Meaning that there is no opportunity for his strategy to even play out and fail because, at the present moment, he can't even get his plan up and running in the first place.

Above all, I'd caution against a class-agnostic interpretation of Trump. No man is an island and what his presidency has is the Republican MAGA and Neo-Con factions of the American political class, along with the Silicon Valley technocrat oligarchs, behind him. This is Trump II and no longer Trump I, so there has already been abundant historical reference to demonstrate that he is a lackey to his class interests, rather than some maverick allowed to singlehandedly dictate American policy as the Reddit liberals would portray. They guide his policies and strategies in the same way that, with his brain matter leaking out of his ears, the Democrats guided Genocide Joe through the genocide against Palestine. As such, it bears to keep in mind that whenever other countries deal with Trump, they are actually seeing past him at the class interests controlling American power which he represents. That power might bear the face of an incompetent, bumbling moron - but it is also the most dangerous geopolitical menace on this planet.

If you're interested in a materialist analysis of Trump's tariffs, I recommend watching Ben Norton's video where he dissects the internal logic of Trump's strategy

I think with the so-called "90 day pause" (not really a "pause" from what's so far discernible in the fine print) and the China-US tit-for-tat escalation, those those two developments should be stable enough to make it possible to finally analyze the situation of the past week for a bit without being being at the risk of rendered immediately outdated within the next hour.

With the 90-day "pause," this has in effect turned from a US trade world war into more of the same Sino-American trade war that has been ongoing since Trump I. What does this mean? It means that the pressure on China has risen far more now that the US has just stated it will fully concentrate against it, though it could be argued that the whole tariff gimmick was all about China in the end anyways.

The damage done to the markets will likely recover for a while due to political reasons since the "pause" was conceded precisely because of the one-two punch of the American world tariffs assault and China's unexpectedly resilient response, which made it unbearable for Trump's Republican oligarch backers to support, as Musk's panic illustrated. Trump and his lackeys like Navarro and Miran may have a chef's kiss plan all sketched out of restoring American manufacturing, but their great sorrow is that they and their perfect plan exist in the mud and dirt of reality, Hegelian idealism faceplanting into the material conditions of the real world. American leadership simply does not have the capacity to tell its oligarchic and financial backers to "shut up" and "bear the pain for the greater good" in the same way that China did during the first term trade war. This "pause" shores up the market from a state of total doom and gloom, which relaxes some of the political pressure on Trump.

I don't really have an opinion on whether the "pause" was a pump-and-dump market manipulation (it totally was) because regardless of the intentionality, it has wider consequences. In that way, it wouldn't be wrong to say that the Chinese response put Trump into a Catch-22. Retaining tariffs on the rest of the world to follow through with their grand plan would be politically untenable through the mounting financial damage to their financial backers, which is the ultimate limiting factor curtailing any US executive action. The US made itself into a capitalist oligarchy and it is forced to lie in the same bed it made through McCarthyist repression. Reducing and pausing tariffs on the rest of the world, as he has now chosen, would provide an avenue to retaliate and take revenge against China, but undermines his original strategic goal.

The point, as Trump's team revealed after people mocked them for tariffing random Pacific islands, was to exact a cost on manufacturers so long as they stay out of the US, no matter where else they set up. This was done to incentivize the profit-seeking calculus of manufacturing companies to determine that it was worth it to come to the US rather than anywhere else. Additionally, and more importantly, this was meant to combat China's manufacturing outsourcing strategy of "Made Abroad with Chinese Characteristics" where Chinese manufacturers went overseas to set up intermediaries in locations like Vietnam (which is why that country received among the highest tariffs), which effectively negated the entire point of the US trade war on China, which was to weaken the Chinese manufacturing sector.

I believe that Trump genuinely sought to "make a deal" with China, particularly in line with the Phase One trade agreement that he briefly secured before the onset of COVID-19 and his electoral defeat in 2020 derailed any lasting progress. Historically, the West's successes against China have often involved signing unequal treaties, which leveraged the centralizing strength of the Chinese state to enforce Western terms on China and its people. Whether Trump anticipated China's response or was genuinely surprised by it, the "pause" he was ultimately forced to concede—at the detriment to his re-shoring strategy—demonstrates the impact of China's reaction.

In any case, the US's focus is once again squarely on China, but this just represents a continuation of the Trump I trade war, a more familiar ground compared to the scenario of the global trade conflict, now put on hold. While China will suffer from this renewed US assault, its experience from the first trade war suggests it is better equipped to weather such pressures. The previous trade war allowed China to consolidate domestic capital around its self-sufficiency goals, making it more resilient. In contrast, the rest of the world, as seen during Biden's term, lacks defenses against US economic and political aggression. Trump can boast about other countries coming up to "kiss his ass," but those nations like Vietnam do so out of a lack of options.

During Biden, China largely took a passive stance, as the US lashed out indiscriminately at multiple targets. To be frank, I'd say that it would have been politically untenable, for the Chinese leadership to have voluntarily stepped forward to faceslap Genocide Joe and draw his attention towards them at that time. Now, however, the Chinese government has a compelling rationale for positioning itself as a shield to redirect American hostility away from the rest of the world and focusing it squarely on China - simply because it's been made a fait accompli through Trump's actions. Since this is what happened during Trump I, at least all the way until the one month prelude in 2020 before the beginning of the pandemic when the US assassinated Soleimani, an intensification against China can be expected to allow the rest of the world, the Global South in particular, some breathing room. This would be a disaster if China is weakened as a result, but the experience accrued from a near-decade of trade war means that China is better positioned than in any time ever and the speed of the Chinese response this time around suggests that the Chinese government knows it.