Donald Trump’s apparent climb-down from his 245 percent tariffs on Chinese imports has critics gleefully proclaiming his humiliation at the hands of China’s Xi Jinping. Not so fast, writes Henry Gao in Tablet. China, Gao argues, needs the U.S. far more than vice-versa, and the Communist regime’s relentless propaganda merely masks worsening structural economic weaknesses that would make a protracted trade war all-but unendurable.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
