Trade War With China – Don Quixote Losing on All Fronts

Date: 22 May 2019 - 21:42

News ID: ۶۶۳۰۴

By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

The US, under its quixotic president, Donald Trump, is losing on all fronts – Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and China to name a few – where it has picked up unnecessary fights with all and sundry.
It seems Trump is the real life picture of Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes’ eccentric character, Don Quixote, who on losing his sanity, does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story, only to end up in miserable conditions in all his encounters.
Don Quixote, at least hired the services of Sancho Panza, as his squire, whose earthy wit often minimized the catastrophic consequences of the crises he would be courting, but Trump doesn’t have any such stable persons in his team of thugs and conmen, who instead egg him to rush headlong over the precipice.
The current declining state of the American economy is an indicator in this regard, especially after collapse of the recent trade talks with China – a country, which like Iran, is proud of its millennia old culture and the wisdom of statecraft associated with civilizations, in sharp contrast to the upstart US with no historical background except for crude military might that for the moment helps it to survive on the usurped land of the decimated Amerindians.
So the current confrontation between Trump and President Xi Jinping cannot be called a ‘clash of civilization’ or a ‘cold war’, despite no holds barred campaign against China launched by the US on all fronts: economic, military and most of all, technology.
According to Xinhua News Agency, by increasing tariffs on Chinese goods astronomically, "the US is fighting for greed and arrogance while China fights to defend its legitimate rights and interests in a trade war which is the creation of one person and his administration.”
Trump, unable to stop the rapid rise of China as a world power in almost all fields, with increasing influence on the economies of most countries, including the European states, has threatened to impose a 25% tariff increase on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, which the Beijing-based People’s Daily called "street fighter-style deceitful drama of extortion and intimidation.”
Washington’s wayward policies, including flexing of military muscles in the international waters of the Pacific, are miserably backfiring.
In response to the recent shortsighted sanctioning of China’s industrial telecommunication giant, Huawei, Beijing has imposed its own set of sanctions on American goods, which are having a devastating impact on entrepreneurs, farmers, industrialists, and businessmen in the US.
One such example is devastation of the lobster industry, which prior to Chinese tariffs, used to export US$87 million of its produce, but now there are no buyers, and the American fishermen have gone bankrupt.
Beijing’s BRI (Belt and Roads Initiative), in spite of Washington’s propaganda, is gaining new allies every day, even in Europe, propelling China to dominate from Southeast Asia to Southwest Asia and all the way to Africa.
Now, there are talks of Xi’s plan to ban exports of "rare-earth-minerals” which would slam every corner of the American economy, from oil refineries to wind turbines to jet engines, since the US imports 80 percent of its needs in this vital field from China. US oil refiners heavily rely on rare-earth imports as catalysts to turn crude oil into gasoline and jet fuel, and non-availability of this crucial element would affect huge swaths of the US economy, with the trade war boomeranging and becoming a geopolitical weapon.
Nuclear-armed China, which recently sent the lunar rover, Yutu-2, the first vehicle of its kind to land on the far side of the moon, will like the Islamic Republic of Iran, never back down, as is evident by its strengthening of cultural defences to blunt the impact of Hollywood movies.
Recently its TV aired the Battle of Shangganling Mountain, which portrays the hard fought Chinese victory over US troops in what is now the Demarcation Line between North and South Korea. It depicts how Chinese troops, short of food and water, managed to hold their ground for 24 straight days until their relief arrived, against all the odds of the superiority of American ground artillery and air power.
The Battle of Shangganling that forced President Harry Truman (who dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945) to concede defeat and agree on the ceasefire deal signed in Panmunjom in 1953, has become a symbol of selfless patriotic sacrifice and heroism of the Chinese people about defeating US imperialism – similar to the heroic liberation of Khorramshahr by Iranian forces on May 24, 1982 from the occupation of the US-supported war machine of Saddam.
Resolute resistance and proper response can shatter the inflated might of the Great Satan.