Opinion | America's new era of inwardness

By Tom Fowdy

It should come as no surprise to anyone yesterday that US Joe Biden unleashed a new wide range of tariffs on Chinese renewable energy goods, including a 100% levy on the import of Electric Vehicles. The policy move had been a long time coming and had been championed with a repetitive narrative accusing Beijing of "overcapacity" in its production, claiming that it has "unfair trade practices" driven by state subsidies.

The move carries little strategic meaning, not least because the US does not in fact import electric vehicles from China anyway. Rather, it should be interpreted first as an electoral ploy by the Biden administration in order to gauge support in a domestic environment that is now defined as "protectionist." Biden and Trump are locked in a race to the bottom on attempting to "bring jobs back to America" and one of the key battlegrounds for the November vote is the state of Michigan, a state famously defined by industrial decline and automobile manufacturing.

A perceived failure to "protect" US car industries, and thus the jobs of the working-class people they employ, could prove politically fatal to Biden, and thus China becomes a convenient scapegoat for being seen to do something about US jobs. It is worth keeping in mind that Trump has proposed far steeper, more extensive, and across-the-board tariffs on goods from China, and we should assume given the political instability he brings that a 2ndTrump administration would be more aggressive, chaotic, and unhinged than the first. Thus, the issue of China becomes a race to the bottom. It is little surprise that with each US Presidential election year, relations deteriorate.

But this speaks volumes about what America has become. Once the world's leading advocate of free trade and open markets, believing them to be a political force for transformation, the United States has ultimately turned inwards. There are few countries in history that have been more associated with "globalization" than modern America, that's because the US has become a hallmark for the exporting of global culture, which could easily be defined through three words: McDonald's, Disney, and Coca Cola, need I say anymore? We see, for example, a famous image circulating of crowds of Russians lining up to attend the first-ever McDonald's in the USSR in 1990.

This is what we understand to be US globalization, and it is an ironic twist of history, as well as a sign of the times, that McDonald's no longer operates in Russia. That's because the era of US-led globalization, where the US shaped the world, is coming to an end and with changes in the geopolitical balance of power, the United States has become inward and defensive because it now believes it is being subject to a contrary globalization that it no longer controls, that being the rise of China. Thus, rather than Francis Fukuyama's infamous "End of History" thesis coming to fruition with liberal democracy defining the day, the rise of China has produced a unique US insecurity that has led them to turn against the notions of free trade they once championed.

Thus, America no longer champions open markets, but tariffs, export controls, sanctions, market exclusions and other embargos, aiming to try and prevent the rise of China and its grasp over global technology and clean energy supply chains. Rather than trying to compete, the US effectively proclaims it simply "cannot" compete and claims that the other party is playing fowl, which is manifest through this rhetoric of "China's unfair practices" or alternatively, dozens upon dozens of scare stories circulated by the mainstream media that baselessly accuse Chinese products of espionage or malign purposes, often without evidence, or worse that they are linked to human rights abuses.

Thus, the US is trying to create supply chains centered around itself in the sectors of clean energy and semiconductors, based in America, but there is no reason to believe this can be done in an affordable and productive scale. In reality, Chinese products will simply pour into the US through third-party proxy countries, such as Mexico, or Vietnam, and little will change, and these products will grow to dominate most of the world. That's because the Neoliberal global economic system is not so much a malign plot of China, but is fact the very system the US itself has created, championed, and thus determined it no longer benefits from. King Canute of Denmark sought to demonstrate literally to his advisors that he could not hold back the waves or shift the changing tides, but Washington lives in a world of its own and we shouldn't expect this US policy to change anytime soon.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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