Hardly anyone doubts that China is on the hunt for advanced technologies by “legal means if possible, and illegal means, if necessary,” as Michael Wessel of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional watchdog agency, recently said.
In his Wall Street Journal piece, Navarro argued that “Trump’s new tariffs will provide a critical shield against this aggression.”
He’s wrong. Indeed, focusing on reducing the global U.S. trade deficit — more than $500 billion in 2017 — will make it much harder to impede China’s ability to acquire advanced technologies on favorable terms.
As Brookings Institution economist David Dollar pointed out, the United States cannot accomplish this policing alone. Frustrated by U.S. technological restrictions, China could turn to other advanced countries — Japan, Germany, Canada, South Korea, France — for similar technologies. We do not hold a monopoly on advanced technologies. To be effective, we need a global coalition that will cooperate in curbing abuses. (Most routine technologies, it’s worth noting, should be available on normal commercial terms.)
The trouble is that Trump’s bombastic assaults against our traditional trading partners — and military allies — virtually guarantee that the essential cooperation will be difficult, if not impossible, to attain. “Trump’s focus on the trade deficit is causing specific harms to American national security, including the distortion of U.S. [foreign] alliance relationships and loss of leverage against China,” wrote Derek Scissors of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.