CONFUSIÓN CON CHINA

En momentos en que se acentúa la confusión por las medidas que el Presidente Donald J. Trump ha adoptado para que China se ciña a las normas internacionales del comercio, que causa a los Estados Unidos y al mundo enormes perjuicios, es saludable leer el análisis que se transcribe porque ayuda a comprender mejor al mandatario.

Estados Unidos tiene un déficit anual de más de 500.000 millones de dólares en la balanza comercial con China y todas las naciones que comercian  con el gigante rojo tienen quejas similares. Aquí se sabía de esa realidad, pero ningún jefe de Estado anterior tuvo las agallas para actuar.

La izquierda progresista, por tradición afín al comunismo de Mao y Stalin, aparece ahora como ardiente defensora del capitalismo occidental, porque Trump cree que es preferible dialogar con Putin para mantener la paz y porque quiere revisar los convenios de comercio sin beneficios recíprocos.

La Bolsa de Valores cayó ante la incertidumbre. Los comentaristas de los medios anti Trump condenaron al Presidente por desatar una “guerra" comercial contra China, intentando hacer aparecer al victimario, China, como la víctima de los desafueros de un “demente” de la Casa Blanca.

Si se desata la “guerra”, la parte responsable sería China. No obstante la idea que se difunde es la opuesta,  pesumiéndose que quienes tienen las de perder son los Estados Unidos. Lo cual es falso, si se refresca lo leído  en el BLOG del 28 de marzo pasado. Si bien la economía china ha avanzado,  lo ha logrado sobre la estructura frágil del dumping y el centralismo total.

A la postre Trump impondrá disciplina en esa economía, que de otro modo se autodestruiría. China tendrá que respetar los acuerdos de reciprocidad de la OMC, incluídos los de propiedad intelectual, lo que forzará a reducir gastos militares y acaso reajustes en esa desmesurada burocracia que lo regula y controla todo. Si los chinos quieren “hacer chino” a Trump elevando tarifas para encarecer sus productos, o sea para vender menos a su principal mercado, se estarían echando una soga al cuello “made in China”.

El artículo que se reproduce a continuación fue escrito por Victor Davis Hanson, historiador especializado en cultura grecorromana. Fue publicado por Real Clear Politics el 5 de este mes y se refiere al Nudo Gordiano que nadie podía deshacer, hasta que Alejandro Magno lo pudo de un solo tajo con su espada, sin vacilaciones ni rodeos “politically correct”.

Trump Is Cutting Old Gordian Knots

The proverbial knot of Gordium was impossible to untie. Anyone clever enough to untie it would supposedly become the king of Asia. Many princes tried; all failed.

When Alexander the Great arrived, he was challenged to unravel the impossible knot. Instead, he pulled out his sword and cut through it. Problem solved.

Donald Trump inherited an array of perennial crises when he was sworn in as president in 2017. He certainly did not possess the traditional diplomatic skills and temperament to deal with any of them.

In the last year of the Barack Obama administration, a lunatic North Korean regime purportedly had gained the ability to send nuclear-tipped missiles to the U.S. West Coast.

China had not only been violating trade agreements, but forcing U.S. companies to hand over their technological expertise as the price of doing business in China.

NATO may have been born to protect the European mainland, but a distant U.S. was paying an increasingly greater percentage of its budget to maintain NATO than were its direct beneficiaries.

Mexico keeps sending its impoverished citizens to the U.S., and they usually enter illegally. That way, Mexico relieves its own social tensions, develops a pro-Mexico expatriate community in the U.S. and gains an estimated $30 billion a year from remittances that undocumented immigrants send back home, often on the premise that American social services can free up cash for them to do so.

In the past, traditional and accepted methods failed to deal with all of these challenges. Bill Clinton's "Agreed Framework," George W. Bush's "six-party talks" and the "strategic patience" of the Obama administration essentially offered North Korea cash to denuclearize.

American diplomats whined to China about its unfair trade practices. When rebuffed, they more or less shut up, convinced either that they could not do anything or that China's growing economy would sooner or later westernize.

Europeans were used to American nagging about delinquent NATO contributions. Diplomatic niceties usually meant that European leaders only talked nonstop about the idea that they should shoulder more of their own defense.

Mexico ignored U.S. whining that our neighbor to the south was cynically undermining U.S. immigration law. If America protested too much, Mexico usually fell back on boilerplate charges of racism, xenophobia and nativism, despite its own tough treatment of immigrants arriving into Mexico illegally from Central America.

In other words, before Trump arrived, the niceties of American diplomacy and statecraft had untied none of these knots. But like Alexander, the outsider Trump was not invested in any of the accustomed protocols about untying them. Instead, he pulled out his proverbial sword and began slashing.

If Kim Jong Un kept threatening the U.S., then Trump would threaten him back and ridicule him in the process as "Rocket Man." Meanwhile, the U.S. would beef up its own nuclear arsenal, press ahead with missile defense, warn China that its neighbors might have to nuclearize, and generally seem as threatening to Kim as he traditionally has been to others.

Trump was no more patient with China. If it continues to cheat and demand technology transfers as the price of doing business in China, then it will face tariffs on its exports and a trade war. Trump's position is that Chinese trade duplicity is so complex and layered that it can never be untied, only cut apart.

Trump seemingly had no patience with endless rounds of negotiations about NATO defense contributions. If frontline European nations wished to spend little to defend their own borders, why should America have to spend so much to protect such distant nations?

In Trump's mind, if Mexico was often critical of the U.S., despite effectively open borders and billions of dollars in remittances, then he might as well give Mexico something real to be angry about, such as a border wall, enforcement of existing U.S. immigration laws, and deportations of many of those residing illegally on U.S. soil.

There are common themes to all these slashed knots. Diplomatic niceties had solved little. American laxity was seen as naivete to be taken advantage of, not as generous concessions to be returned in kind.

Second, American presidents and their diplomatic teams had spent their careers deeply invested in the so-called postwar rules and protocols of diplomacy. In a nutshell, the central theme has been that the U.S. is so rich and powerful, its duty is to take repeated hits for the global order.

In light of American power, reciprocity supposedly did not matter -- as if getting away with something would not lead to getting away with something even bigger.

Knot cutters may not know how to untie knots. But by the same token, those who struggle to untie knots also do not know how to cut them.

And sometimes knots can only be cut -- even as we recoil at the brash Alexanders who won't play by traditional rules and instead dare to pull out their swords. 

(C) 2018 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Savior Generals from BloomsburyBooks. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.