The president hopes to maintain Beijing’s cooperation on sanctions against Pyongyang even as he threatens new tariffs on Chinese goods.
President Trump’s brinkmanship with China this week represents a test of his administration’s tougher foreign policy toward the East Asian power as he seeks to clinch a hard-fought trade deal while preserving Beijing’s cooperation on North Korea.
Trump’s threats to impose another round of punishing tariffs on Chinese imports upended months of bilateral trade negotiations and signaled his frustration over reports from U. S. officials that Chinese negotiators had sought to backtrack on their commitments.
Amid the uncertainty, China hawks, including Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s exiled former White House adviser, rushed in to urge the president to hold a hard line, casting the fight as a proxy for a larger ideological battle for global influence.
“This is history in real time; and the world is a house divided — half slave, half free,” Bannon wrote in a Washington Post editorial Tuesday. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping “are facing off to tip the scales in one direction or the other.”
White House aides discounted the influence of Bannon, who also made his case in a Fox Business Network appearance. But his grandiose talk highlighted a key question: Would Trump settle for a deal that narrowed the $375 billion trade imbalance and boosted the short-term prospects for American farmers — or was he determined to force what aides called long-term “structural” changes to China’s economic system that the Chinese Communist Party has long resisted?
The specter of escalating tensions illustrated the risks of Trump’s China strategy as he has simultaneously pursued denuclearization talks with North Korea, which have rested in part on Beijing’s enforcement of sweeping international economic sanctions on its neighbor.
Analysts said Beijing has not directly linked the two issues, but they warned that mounting hostilities with Washington could complicate the picture at a time when nuclear negotiations have stalled.
“China is not going to take a position on North Korea over a fit of pique with Donald Trump, but at the same time, it is not unlike the Chinese to say, ‘Why the hell should we accommodate you or take risks in service of a U. S. priority when you’re doing this to us on one of our core interests?’” said Daniel Russel, who served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Obama administration.
