Quote:
Originally Posted by jfre81
It's 100 percent legitimate and reasonable - prudent, even - to examine and make changes to trade agreements over time.
There's a process to doing that. Negotiating terms that maximize the benefit for all parties involved, like a "master" of deal-making would do, or trying to strongarm the continent and the world at large to the benefit of the United States of America, and behaving as if the global market wouldn't exist without it. The notion is every bit as arrogant as it is incorrect and self-destructive.
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Good post. Agree completely.
For we are being directed by tweet to fight the wrong battle. The United States created the world trading system (the World Bank, the IMF) after ww2 and benefited greatly for decades. Now industries in other countries have matured and we want to start crying about it? A start would be to drop the victimhood - it's both unappealing and inaccurate.
Still, our objective is to negotiate to our benefit. And, yes, US corporations were so anxious to benefit from the potential Chinese market that some of the early expectations were unrealistic with early terms unfavorable. Plus, the Chinese do manipulate to their benefit where they can requiring ever more stringent monitoring.
But to cast all this in terms of a "war" that we will "win" due to our market power is, in essence, sending a bunch of US consumers in to fight (via increased prices and downstream job losses) a battle that is not theirs.
Tactically, if we were to add our market power to that of our other allied free market economies we *would* reach around 70 percent, which might lead to more favorable terms.
THIS (the national security tariffs) is not THAT.
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