Surprise! Donald Trump is terrible at diplomacy. - WaPo - Update: FT Still Right

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Trump evidently thought he would threaten China with tariffs, and Beijing would fold as quickly as one of the vendors he has made a practice of stiffing. Not so fast. China retaliated by stopping purchases of U.S. soybeans, hurting the farm states whose votes Trump needs. China also made plain it wasn’t going to pressure North Korea into concessions as long as Trump was threatening its trade.

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Lo and behold, Trump caved. First he tweeted that he would lift sanctions on Chinese telecom giant ZTE before kind of, sort of, walking it back. And then this week he ran up the white flag altogether, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin saying that the trade war is “on hold.” (Who knew that wars, like phone calls, could be put “on hold”?) Trump’s trade negotiators had been pushing for China to buy $200 billion more from the U.S. annually – a fantastical figure that U.S. factories and farms could not produce even if they wanted to. China refused, and the administration settled for a vague commitment to buy an unspecified amount of U.S. goods. Trump supporters such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R.-Fla.) correctly labeled this a “surrender,” because it did nothing to address China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property. Trump responded with an incomprehensible tweet: “Our Trade Deal with China is moving along nicely, but in the end we will probably have to use a different structure in that this will be too hard to get done and to verify results after completion.”

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