Redefinition

I can see the heads exploding now. The Economist thinks the Trump Administration is right to attempt to redefine the relationship between the U. S. and China:

THE National Security Strategy released by President Donald Trump’s administration last year augured a major change in China-US relations. Where its predecessors lauded the merits of co-operation with the emerging superpower, Mr Trump’s document promised competition and resistance to Chinese trade and other abuses. The tirade Mike Pence launched against China last week doubled down on that commitment. In a speech delivered at the Hudson Institute, a short walk from Congress and the ongoing Kavanaugh brouhaha, the vice-president castigated the Chinese for bullying investors, buying allies with cheap loans, “tearing down crosses” and much else. This may turn out to be Mr Trump’s most significant mark on the world. America’s new adversarial posture towards China is overdue, popular and probably irreversible.

and

Sooner or later, America’s shift on China was inevitable. After every big hot and cold war of the past century, notes Andrew Krepinevich, a security savant, America’s leaders trusted to collective defence. Woodrow Wilson created the League of Nations, Franklin Roosevelt the “Four Policemen”; Clintonians preached “co-operative security”. But, as surely as nations rise and fall, power politics returns, and this has been apparent in the current iteration for over a decade. China, like Russia, is testing an American-led system it feels constrained by. Distracted by jihadists and fearing the costs of a new superpower rivalry, America has merely been unusually reluctant to accept that fact. Under Barack Obama, the usual mini-cycle of creeping presidential disillusionment with China seemed even to be reversed. His administration drifted from scepticism about China to resignation.

Okay, I’ll bite. A redefinition is inevitable and long overdue. How should the relationship be redefined? IMO the minimum set of demands we should make of China is that China live up to the commitments it made when admitted to the WTO and adhere faithfully to the WTO’s requirements or resign from it. It’s had 20 years. That’s long enough.

That would be a start anyway.