Trump Twice Rejected China Steel Offer

Last edited Tue Aug 29, 2017, 03:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: Political Wire



August 29, 2017 at 7:49 am EDT By Taegan Goddard

Financial Times: “Donald Trump last month rejected a Chinese proposal to cut steel overcapacity despite it being endorsed by some of his top advisers, as he urged them instead to find ways to impose tariffs on imports from China. One week after the July G20 summit in Hamburg — where Mr. Trump criticised China for flooding the world market with cheap steel — Beijing proposed cutting steel overcapacity by 150m tonnes by 2022. But Mr. Trump twice rejected the deal, according to several people familiar with the internal debate.”

“Wilbur Ross, U.S. commerce secretary, endorsed the deal and brought it to Mr. Trump, but the president rejected the proposal. Mr. Ross, a long-time friend of the president, floated the deal again the following week during the two-day meetings with Chinese vice-premier Wang Yang, but Mr. Trump once again refused to accept it.”

Read more: https://politicalwire.com/2017/08/29/trump-twice-rejected-china-steel-offer/

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Trump Seems to Genuinely Want a Trade War With China

By Eric Levitz
@EricLevitz

August 29, 2017
1:08 pm

Donald Trump is not known for putting substance over spectacle.

Throughout his first seven months in office, the president has evinced far more interest in declaring political victories than achieving any particular policy goal. After campaigning on a promise to deliver universal health care, Trump welcomed the congressional GOP’s plan to increase the ranks of the uninsured by 21 million. In fact, Trump demanded that Republicans pass their health-care bill, even though he, himself, described its provisions as “mean” and “coldhearted.” The details didn’t matter — the point was to “win.” Or, more specifically, to have a pretext for declaring victory: When Trumpcare limped its way out of the House, the president held a Rose Garden celebration for a bill that would never become law.

This “fake it till you make it” ethos informed virtually everything the new president did. He spent his first weeks in office signing toothless executive orders that merely reiterated his campaign promises. And when Saudi Arabia orchestrated a blockade of Qatar — on the laughable pretense that Riyadh was scandalized by Doha’s connections to Islamist terrorism — Trump eagerly marketed economic warfare against a key U.S. ally as a breakthrough in his fight against radical Islam.

Give President Trump a chance to license his name to a policy “win” — no matter how superficial — and he’ll take it.

Or so the Chinese government (reasonably) thought. Last month, Beijing offered the Trump administration a commitment to reduce its steel production. The Communist nation runs its steel industry less as a for-profit business than as an employment program, allowing Chinese producers to sell the commodity below the cost of production — thereby rendering European and American steel manufacturers uncompetitive.

more
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/trump-seems-to-genuinely-want-a-trade-war-with-china.html