Trump’s trade war is now lost. The future is China!
Trump, with his ohso tiny crew of “smart businessmen,” thought he could use the great American consumer as a weapon against China. He was wrong. China had already built its own internal market, that was and is growing at twice the rate of the US market. Equally important, China has built trading relations that replace the traditional ones dominated by first the Brits and then by US companies.
China’s goal is to be the Great Britain of the 21st century. The “Great” in “Great Britain” was the Empire .. a world always under the shadow of the union jack, a world first of colonies and tributary members of a commonwealth. The colonies and former colonies lived off of the supply chain to and from the mother country.
Africa today is the most obvious example of the emerging new Chinese empire. The entire continent looks to China a lot like China looked to mother England in the 19th century .. a tributary member of a worldwide trading community led by the Chinese president rather than Queen Victoria.
Team Trump’s emphasis on selling soybeans to China is like Egypt selling raw cotton to the textile mills in mills Queen Victoria’s Manchester. By 1870, trade in cotton reached £38,800,000. There were sixty-six cotton mills in Manchester. While raw cotton imports from the colonies, including America, provided the fuel for this growth, the driving force behind the rise in British cotton production was innovation and invention.