Richard Haass: Tools Introduced on China Won’t Work; There Are No Winners

‘It’s harder to end these wars than begin them’

EXCERPT:

HAASS: "What China did was quite strategic and quite disciplined. Trade policy is all about the intensity of the pain that people feel, and what China did was reacted in a way that introduced potentially intense pain on certain constituencies in the United States and that’s smart. The president and those around him — hey, look, there’s legitimate reasons to be unhappy with Chinese trade policy; forced transfer of intellectual property, stealing the property, tariffs in some cases that are higher than the ones we impose on them. All that is legitimate. The problem is the tools we’ve now introduced won’t fix most of those things. And they’ve created a context where it actually might make it harder for China to do what we want. Because we now made it so public. They have politics, too. And again, it’s always harder to end these wars than it is to begin them. And you're not thinking it through. And I think what China was basically saying, be careful, two can play this game and you are just as vulnerable in some ways as we are. There'll be no winners here. The idea that we’re going to win and they’re going to lose -- no, that’s not how it works. Either we’re both going to win or we’re both going to lose.”

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