Trump vs China is NOT Just Tariff’s….

Aggressive decoupling would bolster American security, from the perspective of Mr. Trump and his aides. And it would also accelerate a trend toward each power being entrenched in its own regional sphere of influence.

Officials in the first Trump administration spoke of the need to decouple from China, with the view that economic and educational ties across many fields equated to a national security threat. But while the efforts reframed the relationship as one of competition rather than cooperation, the volume of trade remained high, even through the pandemic.

Now, in Trump 2.0, officials are taking a second swing at the decoupling campaign….

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Even beyond the global market instability, some analysts and scholars say, there are significant potential downsides for the United States in the rapid and blunt attempts to unwind the ties. They include driving up inflation for Americans, pushing talented researchers into the arms of the Chinese government or to other nations, and losing U.S. government access to Chinese citizens with deep knowledge of their country, some of whom are potential recruits for intelligence agencies….

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“The part I find so hard to understand is that here’s an area where people in China really want to have access to American culture, education and to buy American products, and we’re trying to make it less attractive to them — which I find really odd,” Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, said after Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement on student visas on Wednesday night.

“If we’re competing with Chinese industry and science, it behooves us to understand the competition as well as possible and not to isolate ourselves,” Mr. Roth added.

But in the eyes of senior Trump administration officials, the benefits of that contact do not outweigh the risks of having hundreds of thousands of Chinese students in the United States, especially those working in the physical sciences or on advanced technologies….

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John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow on education policy at the University of California at Berkeley, said Mr. Trump’s “neo-nationalism is translating into a neo-academic Cold War” that includes “unnecessary attacks and limits on international students and faculty.”…

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Xi Jinping, China’s leader, said during a visit to the United States in November 2023 that China would like to welcome 50,000 American students over five years. The pandemic, surging U.S.-China tensions and Mr. Xi’s increasingly repressive authoritarian rule had been causing the number of Americans studying in China to plummet.

Last year, about 800 Americans studied in China. In 2019, before the pandemic, there were about 11,000…

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American consumers have benefited from decades of relatively inexpensive goods manufactured in China, where labor and factory setup costs are much lower than in the United States. But Mr. Trump and several top aides, including Mr. Rubio, say their goal is to rejuvenate manufacturing in the United States through high tariffs. There is no sign, however, that companies in the United States and other nations intend to set up new factories in large numbers here….

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China is showing it is ready to play that game. It struck a blow against the United States in April with its decision to ban exports of critical minerals and magnets in reaction to Mr. Trump’s escalation of tariffs. American industries rely on those minerals and magnets to produce a wide range of items, including aircraft, electric vehicles and weapons.

On Thursday, the Trump administration announced new export controls, including limits on the sale of chip design software.

The escalations by each side amount to supply chain warfare.

But ultimately, the greatest consequence of the efforts at decoupling could be the loss of mutual understanding that is an inevitable result of severed ties — and that, at times in history, has been the prelude to armed conflict.

“There are certainly legitimate security concerns in certain fields of research,” said Mr. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. “But the ability to talk with Chinese students about American culture, American freedom, American research, and to hear their perspectives on what we do and what they do in their country has enriched the lives of many, many American students over a long period of time now, and many Chinese students.”….

More….

Note….

With Putin’s Russian actions in Ukraine and Europe….

Is an Amrican President backing into a WWII type two ‘front’ War?

One that Trump might NOT be in office for?