Terrorism, hard drugs, the Soviet Empire with 1000's of nuclear warheads on the table, and every nation draw into the post-WW2 vacuum ... are not 'fetishes'.
There are very real and material issues between the US and China with respect to governmental intervention, externalization of costs, theft of IP, anti-competitive acts, capital controls, state-sponsored espionage, politicization of monetary policy - etc..
It's a wide and expansive set of issues that were essentially ignored for 30 years because it didn't so much matter, moreover, it was probably beneficial for everyone anyhow for China to have done what it did (except obviously the environmental and humanitarian externalizations).
But China wants to play in the advanced league now, so a different set of rules is going to have to apply, or there'll have to be permanent tariffs.
Trump is playing mostly 'big stick' and not nuance on this, but it seems to actually be working, and many of his would-be detractors (me included?), particularly the Dems are quiet on the issue because everyone has wanted to take up this issue for some time, but nobody has the power to.
Every foreign office in the West right now has a big 'China file' of issue to contend with, and they're all happy this is happening on some level.
I'm not hugely hopeful there will be big reforms anywhere, I think we're going to see tariffs on a bunch of things, but that won't be so bad.
In the grand-grand scheme of things I don't think the end result will be hugely noticeable to most people.
There are very real and material issues between the US and China with respect to governmental intervention, externalization of costs, theft of IP, anti-competitive acts, capital controls, state-sponsored espionage, politicization of monetary policy - etc..
It's a wide and expansive set of issues that were essentially ignored for 30 years because it didn't so much matter, moreover, it was probably beneficial for everyone anyhow for China to have done what it did (except obviously the environmental and humanitarian externalizations).
But China wants to play in the advanced league now, so a different set of rules is going to have to apply, or there'll have to be permanent tariffs.
Trump is playing mostly 'big stick' and not nuance on this, but it seems to actually be working, and many of his would-be detractors (me included?), particularly the Dems are quiet on the issue because everyone has wanted to take up this issue for some time, but nobody has the power to.
Every foreign office in the West right now has a big 'China file' of issue to contend with, and they're all happy this is happening on some level.
I'm not hugely hopeful there will be big reforms anywhere, I think we're going to see tariffs on a bunch of things, but that won't be so bad.
In the grand-grand scheme of things I don't think the end result will be hugely noticeable to most people.