Steve Sailer writes: From the Financial Times via Marginal Revolution:
I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by [Trump’s] skill as a strategist and tactician…He [Yafei] worries that strategic competition has become the new normal and says that “trade wars are just the tip of the iceberg”.
…In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump’s response is a form of “creative destruction”. He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington. Once the order is destroyed, the Chinese elite believes, Mr Trump will move to stage two: renegotiating America’s relationship with other powers. Because the US is still the most powerful country in the world, it will be able to negotiate with other countries from a position of strength if it deals with them one at a time rather than through multilateral institutions that empower the weak at the expense of the strong…
Comment: “In my line of work, I have a lot of contact with Chinese specialists, usually on European or security issues. It always struck me as interesting how morose they were regarding Trump when I asked them – they never fell into the trap of dismissing him as a vulgarian and laughing their worries away like the Western Euros.”
