Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been a big news story coming out that President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, the leader of China, have had a trade deal, a diplomatic deal, a very multifaceted deal.
The Left is already criticizing Trump by saying that he came down on tariffs or he didn’t get as many soybean sales. I think that’s nonsense. China will probably have the highest tariffs still leveled on it, somewhere between 37% and 47%, that it’s ever had with the United States.
More importantly, they are going to lift their restrictions on rare earth mineral sales. We needed that. But that’s gonna be irrelevant in five or six years because, whether we’re opening domestic mines here in the West or whether Australia’s opening them, the West is going to make that irrelevant very quickly. We just need a short-term pause.
The biggest deal was that they promised to stop sending raw fentanyl to Mexico and laundering Mexican money from the cartels. That’s very important, if we can enforce it, because there have been more people killed since we started counting fentanyl deaths in the United States—some 600,000—than in all of our foreign wars combined. Almost as many people were killed from fentanyl that were killed in the Civil War. And that was directly—China was directly responsible for that.
And if they can stop sending these cartels fentanyl, which they then manufacture into pills or other drugs that look like prescription drugs or they hide the lethality of the fentanyl product, and we can get that death toll down, it would be a stunning achievement.
In some ways, Donald Trump, if he could stop the 70,000 deaths per year, 600,000 since China started this, he would’ve saved more lives than anybody in American history.
So, the question is, why is China now starting to deal? I think their paradigm, which they had before, that a weak president, like Barack Obama or Joe Biden, on the one hand, or a naive Republican president or candidate like Mitt Romney, John McCain, and maybe the Bushes, the latter felt that, if you opened China up, you had joint partnerships, you didn’t worry about trade imbalances or Chinese mercantilism, everybody would get affluent and they would become democratized and China would be a liberal democracy—that’s not gonna happen.
They used that money, affluence to build up their military, to oppress dissent, and to tighten down on their war against us and the West in general.
The Left, of course, projected weakness. They didn’t wanna negotiate with Biden. I mean, why negotiate with him when you can take him to the cleaners?
They knew that if Donald Trump had been president, he would’ve shot that balloon that traversed the length of the United States on Day One.
He knows that if Secretary of State Marco Rubio had gone to Alaska and was dressed down by the Chinese, he would’ve screamed it back at them and walked out. Not like the Biden diplomatic team that took a beating in Anchorage, Alaska, the second month of their tenure in 2021.
So, the Left had projected weakness after the Ukraine war, the Middle East war, the Kabul skedaddle, etc.
And so, then the Chinese said to themselves: Is our paradigm working? We talk about green energy, Paris peace accord. And these stupid Westerners, they invest in the subsidized, inefficient, expensive wind and solar, while we build coal and oil and nuclear plants. This is a great thing.
And all of a sudden they think: Uh-oh. This crazy, unpredictable, dangerous, volatile Trump is stopping that. And now he’s going to make efficient energy, the way we do.
And then they thought, well, it’s good to have open borders. We’ll send some of our citizens across you. You in the United States are becoming like a drug-ridden, borderless, illegal immigration, vast numbers of illegal aliens, socialist economy like Europe. And we can handle Europe easily.
And now, all of a sudden, the border is closed. We’re deporting illegal aliens. We’re going after the cartels. And China says, wow, this is unnerving.
And then, more importantly, we are getting rid of DEI. China loved DEI. They used their propaganda to promote that at any cost. They saw that as the same as their own ideological era, when Mao Zedong used DEI—ideology instead of meritocracy—and ruined the economy.
And they said to themselves, we don’t wanna do that. Even though they’re ideological themselves, they felt they have less ideological constraints than they did under Mao. And they wish that we had more, even, of these race, gender, sexual orientation, DEI. And now they see it going.
So, when they look at the United States and they say: Wow, they’re meeting their military recruitment, producing the greatest amount of nuclear, coal, oil, and natural gas energy in the history of the world. Their military has all of these sophisticated technologies. Silicon Valley is no longer “hate Trump,” left-wing. They’ve got people like David Sacks or even Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. They’re all now on the team. And they’re all free to innovate and invest. And now he’s got $15 trillion, supposedly, of foreign investment coming into the United States.
We can’t bully Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, Taiwan anymore because we don’t know what Trump will do. And now they think Trump will protect them. And they’re rearming at a fanatical rate, Japan especially.
How did this happen? When we look over to our clients, we lost our foothold in Iran. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, they may come back, but they’re neutered. And Russia—we’re giving stuff to Russia, but Russia is tied down. They’ve lost their toehold in the Middle East. The Assad kleptocracy is gone. And they’ve lost a million people. We bet on the wrong side. And now, maybe, Russian President Vladimir Putin might be in political trouble. Now we buy oil, the Chinese say, as does India, but now there might be a secondary boycott.
So, what I’m getting at is they sized up the domestic renaissance here at home—low inflation, basically 3% or below, 3%, probably, at the end of the year of gross domestic product, stock market record levels, vast new investments—and they said, you know what? The United States is back. And the foreign—the atmosphere is very different. Neutrals will probably join them. And their friends are emboldened. So, they’ve got new alliances. NATO is stronger than it’s ever been.
So, you add all of that up and the Chinese said to themselves the following: I think it’s time to cut a deal. Not that we’re gonna give up on trying to erode and subvert the United States. That’s our long-term goal, is to make its foreign presence analogous to the British Empire around 1955, just to shatter it with our Belt and Road and all these other initiatives—from the Panama Canal to the Spratly Islands, from Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s chauffeur to Rep. Eric Swalwell’s intern.
We’re gonna try to subvert it, but for right now, the next three years, we’re going to pause and try to cut a deal because we’re losing with this guy. In seven years, in three years, seven years, 11 years, maybe we’ll get another Biden or Obama, or maybe we’ll get somebody in the Right who believes that they can send all of the corporations and all of their technology and invest in China. But for right now, it’s wiser to cut a deal.
And Trump is basically saying to China, then: We’re back. And you’re not gonna win. Not yet. Not yet.
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