An insider

Joseph W. Sullivan

Former Staff Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers

he trade dispute, though, is now about much more than economics—it’s testing whether a democratically elected government can prevail in the face of the authoritarian government of the world’s most populous country. And everyone who values democracy or human rights should hope that, one way or another, the United States ultimately prevails in that struggle.

We are not a proportional democracy, we are a republic, and that makes all the difference in the world. We do not equally share in policy, some of us represented by a one party block of House member, some represented by a small state senator.

California is barely American, New York was US foreign policy for a hundred year, we do  not directly share the burden of our imbalances..  Trump is unlikely to get California to agree on trade imbalances, we do not see them, we do not care. Not are the large states willing to pay for all the wars small state senators start.

China is a large thing that centralizes and decentralizes in long term fashion having little to do with us. It is mostly different, not worse. It spies on its citizens, so do we. It has tariffs, we want them too. It has a bizarre policy on the South China sea, yes, but all we need to do is hang in.

At the center of China’s responses are the tit-for-tat tariffs intended to hurt American farmers, a constituency that tends to support President Donald Trump and to live in crucial swing states. These tariffs appear designed to deliver political pain in the U.S., not to produce any economic benefit for China. China’s other political meddling, as Vice President Mike Pence recently laid out, includes attempts at interference in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Recent targets of Chinese Communist Party influence campaigns also includestate and local governments, Congress, academia, think tanks, and the business community.

Commie Rats they are, but socialism is still legal, last time I heard, and Pence is stuck with the domino theory, we was likely a big Vietnam war fan.  Nor is Pence all that bright. Here he does dominos.

The strategy that China now seems to be displaying in the U.S. can be deployed to punish elected leaders around the world for any number of reasons.

He thinks some bizarre ideal is at stack, he cannot even tell the difference between republic and democracy.  Listen to someone a little more nuanced about foreign policy, rarely does government produce thinkers in the area.

But a Chinese victory in the trade conflict, now, would damage democracy and human rights regardless of the economics of the initial trade issues themselves.

Pure horse manure.  Chinese generally promote capitalism, and Chinese food around the world.  China is not promoting anything at the moment, it is defending itself against a call for real democracy, not yet another republic like the USA.  China will have no greater or lesser success at changing other people than has the USA during its super power run.

Sullivan you are a shit head and a fraud, and you will cost us trillions in unnecessary defense spending.