President Trump kicked off his press conference Friday morning talking about China. Although he didn’t offer much new information about the ongoing trade talks with Beijing, it’s clear that negotiations remain a stalemate.
Speaking about negotiations set to resume next week, Trump explained, “We’ve had a negotiation going on for about two days. It’s going extremely well.” Undermining that positive assessment, he added, “Who knows what that means?” only to come back with, “because it only matters if we get it done.”
Those remarks come amid speculation that Trump might opt to extend the March 1 deadline, set late last year, to work out a deal with Beijing. Given several months of talks between Chinese and American negotiators have made seemingly little progress, it’s unlikely that both sides will have reached an agreement by the end of the month.
But simply giving both sides more time to keep talking isn’t likely to yield substantially different results.
Indeed, Trump and his administration have made clear that what he hopes to achieve in talks with China is nothing short of rewriting the country’s entire economic model by cutting state ties to industry and opening up previously closed sectors to foreign investment. That’s not going to happen, as it would destroy the current political power structure that underpins the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese President Xi Jinping, much like Trump, is not one to willingly bargain away his authority.
For Trump, that means that he’s more likely to have to claim victory on “getting it done” when it comes to a deal with China rather than actually securing significant concessions. He likely knows this, hence the open-ended suggestion that it’s unclear what negotiations “going well” actually means.
In the end, the most likely result is that China will grant mild concessions and Trump will take it as a victory, never mind that such an agreement isn’t likely to be anywhere close to “covering everything, all of the points that people have been talking about for years and said couldn’t be done,” as Trump promised in his press conference.
If that’s going to be the outcome anyway, Trump would do far better to end the trade war with an agreement instead of an extension of negotiations, and with it, continuing tariffs. Then his administration can do the real legwork of targeting China as the Commerce Department has been quietly doing all along.
Trade wars, it turns out, aren’t quite the easy battles that Trump made them out to be.
