In a sharp escalation of a trade war that began with his predecessor Donald Trump, US President Joe Biden’s administration recently unveiled a new set of tariffs on Chinese goods, including a quadrupling of the tariff on electric vehicles (EVs) that brings the rate to 100%. It did not take long for China to retaliate by launching an anti-dumping probe into chemical imports from the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Taiwan. Have US-China economic relations reached the point of no return?
For Yale’s Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, the answer is yes: the US and China are now in a “full-blown economic war,” which will have “far-reaching geopolitical consequences.” But that’s not all. The latest tariffs also amount to an admission by the Biden administration that past measures have failed to prevent China from “galloping ahead,” and, by targeting EVs, they “undermine the broader climate-change agenda.”
Carl Bildt of the European Council on Foreign Relations offers a similarly negative assessment. The new measures have no “economically redeeming features” and cannot even be “justified on national-security grounds,” as past protectionist policies were. All they will do is “prevent cheaper, often better, green technologies from reaching US consumers,” while accelerating the destruction of an “international economic order that delivered enormous gains over many decades through trade integration and globalization.” Läs artikel