America First to America’s Fall

Edited Transcript of China Now, a Top-Rated Political Commentary Show Broadcast Weekly in China:

Zhang Weiwei:

When Trump was re-elected last year, foreign media kept asking us Chinese how we viewed Trump. I said most Chinese probably think Trump is slightly better than Biden. We find Biden too hypocritical, while Trump is relatively more straightforward. My personal assessment of Trump has been consistent: he has a fairly accurate read on many of America’s problems, but the prescriptions he offers are often wrong- disastrously wrong.

For example, he recognizes that the US has long overextended its national strength and is becoming a failing state. He acknowledges that the world has become multipolar and that the US lacks the capacity to manage the entire globe. He sees that Ukraine stands no chance of winning and decide to stop wasting American money, seeking instead a compromise with Russia. He dismantled more or less the USAID, the global headquarters of color revolutions, which has brought immense suffering to many nations and also caused significant losses to the US itself.

However, as the leader of a major power, Trump’s vision, character, experience, and knowledge are all vastly inadequate to fulfill his Make America Great Again agenda. Trump’s most defining trait is his unpredictability. After all, he co-authored The Art of the Deal, and his favorite business tactic is to keep shifting positions, catch opponents off guard, apply maximum pressure, and then strike a deal on the most favorable terms for him.

Thus, he announced increasingly higher tariffs on all Chinese goods, convinced that China needed him and expecting a phone call from China’s leadership. But what he got instead was not a call from Beijing but progressively stronger countermeasures, including equivalent tariffs- up to 125%- on all US imports, a long list of American entities added to export control lists, and strict restrictions on the export of rare earth materials and related goods.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman commented, Trump sends a “message to the world- and to the Chinese: ‘I couldn’t take the heat.’ If it were a book it would be called The Art of the Squeal.” In reality, his reckless tariff policies triggered massive sell-offs of US Treasury bonds, which could very well collapse the American financial system. Many also suspect that Trump’s flip-flopping is a way to manipulate the stock market- raising tariffs, then suspending them, shorting and then buying back- turning Wall Street into a casino for his family. After all, he’s not just a real estate tycoon but also a former casino owner. This speaks volumes about America’s institutionalized corruption.

Trump’s constant policy reversals have left him with no credibility. American businesses and consumers are utterly confused, and an economic recession coupled with higher inflation seems now inevitable. Every Chinese understands the wisdom of a saying from Chinese philosopher Lao Zi over two thousands years ago, governing a great nation like cooking a delicate dish- prudent and consistent approach is the key. But Trump doesn’t get it. Flip-flopping has always been a cardinal sin in Chinese statecraft culture; Trump’s approach not only fails to establish any authority but also destroys trust.

Under Trump’s leadership, the US no longer behaves like a decent major power. He has revived America’s imperialist tradition, first targeting submissive allies like Canada and Denmark, then extorting Ukraine for $500 billion in mineral rights. This shows not only that America’s allies are easy prey for his bullying but also that the US has lost all moral authority globally, leaving it increasingly isolated.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote in Handelsblatt that America’s word is now worthless on the world stage. He noted that the US accounts for less than 20% of the global economy, while the remaining 80%—represented by most other nations—has united against the US.

When the US-China trade war began in 2018, I gave a speech at Harvard. I said that China’s leadership is looking ahead to 2050, while Trump’s vision is stuck in 1950. Now, with his latest tariff offensive, he seems determined to drag the US back to 19th century mercantilism. His tariff calculations, his blind faith in protectionism, and his belief that high tariffs can bring manufacturing back to America reveal his ignorance and myopia.

Not long ago, The New York Times interviewed me. I told them that the tariff war, started by the US, would ultimately backfire. Our research shows that over 90% of the increased tariffs were actually shouldered by American businesses and consumers. The outcome this time will be no different.

In another interview with Russian news agency TASS, I told them when Trump threatened last year to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to 60%, I said then Please tell President Trump he can raise them to 600%- it wouldn’t make a difference. Our research shows that America’s economic dependence on China far exceeds China’s reliance on the US. Most Chinese exports to America are essential goods for which the US has no easy substitutes.

As for Trump’s wish to bring companies like Apple and Microsoft back to the US, their supply chains are deeply embedded in China. Within a 150-kilometer radius, they can source every component they need. This ecosystem took China decades to build. The US has been deindustrializing for 30-40 years, how could they possibly replicate us?

Recently, publications like The New York Times and The Times of London have compared Trump to Gorbachev. Just as Gorbachev’s radical “shock therapy” accelerated the Soviet Union’s collapse, Trump’s reckless policies may well push America down the same path.

Conservative writer Jonathan V. Last penned an article titled The Age of America is Over, arguing that the US empire is committing suicide, and Trump’s tariff war is just the latest move that wrecked the US economy, dealt a fatal blow to NATO, and dismantled the American-led world order in just 71 days.

The Soviet Union collapsed in part due to fiscal ruin. The US is now in a similar predicament- $37trillion in debt, with annual interest payments exceeding $1 trillion. America is already insolvent, surviving only on the residual credibility of its financial myth , which makes many people believe that US T-bills are risk-free asset. But Trump’s tariff chaos has exposed the fragility of the US financial system, including its treasuries, triggering a rare simultaneous crash in stocks, bonds, and the dollar.

The massive sell-off of US treasuries is the core issue. America’s ability to borrow new debt to pay off old debt is dwindling, and a fiscal crisis looms. The late Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, who accurately predicted the Soviet collapse, forecast in 1999 that the American Empire would collapse around 2020. He introduced the concept of “magic”- the idea that empires rule through an illusion of superiority, whether it’s the myth of the “shining city upon a hill,” the sanctity of American institutions, or the perceived invincibility of the dollar and Treasury bonds. Once this “magic” fades, the empire falls.

On April 5, The Economist published a cover story titled How America Could End Up Making China Great Again. It argued that while Trump builds walls, China is reshaping global trade relations, with its development model gaining widespread acceptance among developing nations. I said back in 2018 that the US would lose its tech war against China- and we should remember to award President Trump a special medal for exceptional contributions to China’s success.

The irony is that Trump never intended to help China- he dreams of containing China. But his reckless actions have only accelerated China’s rise. The reason is simple: China’s path represents, as a Chinese saying goes, the righteous way of the world, and the righteous will have many supporters, while the unrighteous will have few. The Chinese model is gaining traction, while America’s is faltering.

I believe this tariff war, forced upon China by the US, along with China’s resolute, precise, and powerful counterstrikes, will show the world which nation is truly the largest and strongest economy. Not only largest, but also strongest. The answer is China, not the US. The world has changed completely, just compare Trump’s crude, chaotic tariffs with China’s steady, precise, sharp, and innovative countermeasures.

Let me briefly explain what “innovative” means here. We are using a 21st-century, smart economy-based , full-industry-chain approach to dismantle America’s 19th-century tariff barriers- in other words, a blow from a higher dimension. We are also advancing new technological standards to keep global trade rules with changing times.

By the way, Chinese people refer to Trump by nicknames like Chuanpu or Trump the face-changing, Dong Wang or the King of Knowing all, and Trump the Nation Builder. They are not just humorous- but also reflecting the discernment, sophistication, and wit of ordinary people from a civilizational state like China. Doesn’t that terrify our rivals?

Chandran Nair:

I wanna make a few points because Professor Zhang has already made very clear his views on the tariff war. The main point I’d like to make, though, is that the tariff war is a wake-up call for the world. In that way, the United States, the new administration, through being misguided and not having a basic understanding of how the world works in the economics, and in fact, not understanding the needs of their own country, but has done the world a favor.

Because now we all understand that the economic neoliberal model that we all copied and followed for the last 100 years, at least, is unsustainable, because it’s premised on a couple of things. And america is the best example of this on excessive debt over consumption and the pricing of externality that creates existential threats. So we have to deal with this. And I would say that China is not bowing to the bullying of the United States. This is not to just simply say the United States is the bully, but the world is seeing very clearly that this current administration wants the world to bow to it. And weaker countries are unable to do so and China, by not bowing. As we say, in sports, took one for the team, meaning the rest of the world. That’s very important to understand that this is a wake up call.

So at this point in time, I think it’s important for us to understand that the West is going through a lot of soul searching and pain, but rather than engaging with the world. In terms of understanding the privileges of a previous era, 500 years of colonization, extraction, et cetera, has come to an end. It needs to deal with the world which is multipolar, where everyone is equal, be it China or a small country like Cambodia. It has tried and continues to try, led by the United States, to maintain its privileges, and therefore, pay any price to hurt anybody else. And this cannot carry on.

And in a piece that professor, I think you used a piece of mine 2 years ago to talk about the West has to come to a a new reckoning. I think I mentioned five things. The first is that it has to understand history is now being told by us. It’s our story, not his story. So that is changing the world how we understand what happened before not to seek revenge, but to understand. Secondly, we understand that the so called international world order was nothing, but an orderly thing in which laws, et cetera, existed to protect everyone. Because the United States and some of its European allies have blatantly broken many of these so called rules. Look at the war in Gaza, look at all of those things. The third is understanding that the international financial architecture, which is essentially one that the United States, in particular, and its allies have used to weaponize. Finance is crumbling as the rest of the world wakes up and says, we cannot tolerate this sort of arbitrary use of finance to punish everybody. The fourth part of it is the understanding that many of us had, because we thought the West was going to be a benevolent post-second world war, that it was a peacemaker that it has peace in mind. But it actually has become very clear that war is an industry. There’s no peace industry, and so the West is peacemakers that is being eroded. Finally, the point that many of us, including people like me who were educated to believe in such things as freedom, free press and the Western media as the front runners. Carrying that message of free press, the Western media has completely capitulated.

Then the last two points I would say about the time we live in is that we live in a period where the crisis of capitalism is essentially being exposed. Tariffs is one, but the crisis of capitalism is simply theirs. We have a system in which it urges people. If I can put it this way, to buy things, they don’t need money, they don’t have, which is essentially the debt. And that’s created the monster that the US is having to confront with in terms of deficit, household debt, national debt, national debt in US is continuous wars, spending money on consumption in relation to essentially spending to facilitate the war machine. And many other things.

Finally, so I finished by saying, we give too much oxygen to the Americans and the Europeans and worry about what they are going to do in a way it doesn’t matter. What we need to do now is think in the most populated part of the world, which is Asia, and then there’s Africa, and the Middle East. What are we going to do to navigate the next 100 years? It took 100 years for the Americans, very short time, to essentially get into the mess. They are, almost the collapse of an empire. And we hope America doesn’t collapse in a bad way. But we hope it will coexist with others, but it took 100 years. Now China has come through. It is essentially a very important, powerful nation. The question is, how will China navigate the next 50 years? What sort of political economy will it have? How will it share with its neighbors? And Chinese government has said a lot about it. But the reality has to be manifest. It’s how it deals with its neighbors, how it shares and how it keeps its people happy as well. That for me is the most important thing. I hope the United States will come to its senses with the Europeans.

Editor: yanghanyi