The insanity, cuelity, and incompetence of Trump on the global stage is pushing forward a global transition that needed to happen. Europe needs to pay its fair share to defend itself and the world can’t continue to let China take advantage of the system. The U.S. led world order is undemocratic and deeply flawed, but what is the alternative?
The Biden administration went to Europe and asked if war breaks out in the Pacific, are you with us? Europe said no. Yet, they expect the U.S. to protect them from Russia.
“Tiananmen Square is a vast space in the center of Beijing with monumental, communist-era buildings along two sides and the mausoleum of Mao Zedong, who founded the communist era in 1949, on the south end.
University students occupied this symbolically important site in the spring of 1989. Their calls for freedoms divided the party leadership. The decision to send in troops marked a decisive turning point in the evolution of modern China, keeping the party firmly in control as it loosened economic restrictions.”
“Russia is catching up to Ukraine in drone production thanks to greater financial resources, production lines far from the front lines and especially help from China, a senior Ukrainian official told POLITICO.
“Chinese manufacturers provide them with hardware, electronics, navigation, optical and telemetry systems, engines, microcircuits, processor modules, antenna field systems, control boards, navigation. They use so-called shell companies, change names, do everything to avoid being subject to export control and avoid sanctions for their activities,” said Oleh Aleksandrov, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service. “Yet officially, China sticks to all the rules. Yet only officially.”
Beijing has repeatedly denied supplying any drones or weapons components to Russia, calling Ukrainian protests “baseless accusations and political manipulation.” But Aleksandrov said Russia has a critical dependency on the supply of Chinese spare parts for both tactical and long-range drones.”
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“Pavlo Palisa, a former top military commander and now deputy head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, said in a statement that so far this year, 80 percent of the damage to Russia’s equipment and personnel has been done with drones. In May alone, Ukrainian drones destroyed 89,000 Russian targets.”
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“Kyiv says that its access to new drones has been curtailed by China, while Beijing has placed no such restrictions on Russia.”
“Burns noted it’s important to counter Beijing’s increasingly aggressive economic, diplomatic and military global footprint — but warned that Trump is going about it all wrong, particularly by using tariffs as a cudgel against longtime partners who otherwise might have allied with the U.S. against China.”
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“The fact that we’ve had trouble convincing the Chinese it’s in our interest to have our senior military leaders talking. My nightmare scenario as ambassador was not an intentional conflict, but an accident.”
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” I think the fundamental mistake that was made was that when we imposed tariffs on China, we also imposed high tariffs on South Korea, Japan, the European Union, Canada and Mexico. All those countries are on our side in the big issues that separate us from China. All of them have the same economic issues and trade problems with China. If we had highlighted China as the major disruptor of global trade, which China has been for the last couple of decades, and formed a coalition with the EU and Japan and the U.S. — that’s 60 percent of global GDP — we would have had leverage for these negotiations.”
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“The Chinese have been saying every day for the last several weeks that the United States is being unfair, that we’re a bully, that we’re disrupting global trade. In fact, they’re the biggest problem in global trade. Intellectual property theft against American and other nations’ companies; forced technology transfer; dumping of EVs, lithium batteries, solar panels on the rest of the world below the cost of production; disrupting global markets; trying to kill the manufacturing industries in places like the United States and Europe.”
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“I think what the American people need to understand — our government and both parties — is that China is a worthy competitor. Their science and technology talent is prodigious. The level of scholarship, of patents, of research in some areas exceeds us, or is equal to us. In some critical areas of technology transformation, they are putting massive amounts of state-directed money into their national champions like Huawei, with companies that they want to succeed in the world. They’re doing it on a consistent basis, and they plan over decades, so they have that advantage.
When I was leaving in January, the Chinese announced $15 billion of state money going into quantum computing alone. They want to beat us to the punch there. That’s something that’s not as well understood in American society and even in our press — people have older, conventional views of China that are outdated.”
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“The destruction of USAID was a catastrophic mistake for the United States. That was our agency that said to the rest of the world, “We’ll help you on vaccines. We’ll help you with HIV. Will help you with polio.” Elon Musk and company destroyed USAID in one week and laid off 8,500 people. That helped China.
The Chinese then went out with a massive propaganda blitz the next day all over the world saying, “The United States is not interested in you any longer.” I watched the Chinese do this in February and March. The way the cuts were done, the fact that it was done with so little thought, so little information, and so little respect for our career civil servants was disgraceful.”
“Basically, the feds impose damaging new taxes and trade restrictions on farmers for reasons mostly related to ideology and rent-seeking, then undo their effects by making farmers more dependent on government largesse. Often lost in the discussion, but one reason that U.S. farmers are so dependent on selling commodity crops to China and elsewhere is that past policies essentially subsidized them to do so.
Like with all things political, various federal farm policies have created a series of odd bedfellows. Many environmental groups have lauded past farm bills because they provide incentives for farmers to set aside land as open space, but overall the federal meddling has harmed the environment. For instance, federal sugar subsidies have greatly diminished the Florida Everglades by encouraging the conversion of wetlands into sugar fields.”
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“All these policies drive up food prices for non-farmers and reduce our choices in meats and produce.”
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“Instead of creating this convoluted, counterproductive policy that mimics a Rube Goldberg farce, the government should do the basics to help farmers. It should scuttle tariffs, halt subsidies, eliminate costly shipping levies, create a guest-worker program so farmers can have a consistent labor source, lower taxes, bolster water infrastructure and let markets do the rest.”
“A one-two punch from the United States risks shattering the already fragile trade war truce between Washington and Beijing, with Chinese tech companies and students both dealt shock blows by the Trump administration”
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“The first hit came in a Financial Times report on Wednesday that said moves by US President Donald Trump had effectively cut off some American companies from selling software used to design semiconductors to China.”
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“But it was the second blow from the White House that landed right in the living rooms of Chinese families, with US State Secretary Marco Rubio saying the US will “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students” – especially those in critical fields or with connections to the Chinese Communist Party.”