CNN host Fareed Zakaria said Friday on CNN’s “OutFront” that President Donald Trump had “badly bungled” the trade war with China.
Zakaria said, “These are the highest stakes, and the Trump administration has badly bungled this. The greatest deterrent to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan which would send you know, seismic ripples through the world economy, through the international political system. The greatest deterrent was not any weapon we had. It was the fear that China had that they would be decoupled from the American economy, the economy with which they had for the last 40 years built a deep, interdependent relationship.”
He continued, “Trump has fired that gun pointlessly, without a plan, without a strategy. As far as I can tell that, the tariffs on China were raised to 145% simply because he wanted to save face. You know, he was backtracking and flip-flipping on all the other tariffs. So he needed to turn China into the into his punching bag. But because of that, what he has done is play into China’s hardliners hands. They have been waiting for this decoupling.”
Zakaria added, “Don’t forget China is a dictatorship. Xi Jinping doesn’t have to worry about public opinion in quite the same way that Donald Trump has to worry about it.”
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