This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, the combination of economic impact, personal animus and raw nationalism of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. On Sundays, we look at the major themes of the week past and how they will define the week ahead. Sign up for the daily newsletter here. “War is diplomacy by other means,” said Carl von Clausewitz in a cliché that launched an infinite number of bad op-ed pieces.[1] I’d like to suggest a possibly fresher corollary: “Economics is war by other means.”[2] Consider all the major conflicts that began as trade disputes: The Lelantine War[3]; the Punic Wars; the first Byzantine-Bulgarian War; the Anglo-Hanseatic War; the French and Indian War; the Opium Wars; the First Anglo-Dutch War and its even more fun sequel; the Battle of Naboo[4] — in fact, more often than not it’s hard to separate economic wars from the shooting kind.  Source: Reddit But the conflict I have in mind is one not usually seen as a trade war: World War II’s Pacific Theater. This may be unfair, but I’ll assume that most Americans think the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was exactly that, a total surprise. And while it’s true the Japanese Navy’s target was unexpectedly audacious, the savvier geopolitical minds of the day saw war between the US and Japan as increasingly inexorable. And the proximate causes were the American embargoes in 1940 on scrap iron, steel and especially oil to the Japanese Empire, followed in 1941 by a freeze on Japanese assets in US banks. The US was cutting off the blood supply of the heart of a Japanese war machine fighting expansionist conflicts across Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia. When bellicose countries are backed into an economic corner, bad things happen.
So, what are we to make of the White House’s astonishing trade sanctions on China? At the time of this writing they are at 145%, but by the time of you’re reading it may be up to one bazillion percent if a certain someone decides to change his mind on Truth Social. Thursday’s US sanctions on a China-based storage terminal for holding Iranian crude may seem comparatively insignificant, but we can hear an echo of the past: Beijing is just as dependent on foreign oil for its rise to Asian mastery today as Japan was 85 years ago. So, if “Liberation Day” — more like Liberation Week — was the Pearl Harbor of the new cold war between Washington and Beijing, who came out ahead? “In America’s escalating trade war with China, it won’t be Beijing that blinks first. President Xi Jinping can withstand way more economic and political pain than US President Donald Trump,” writes Karishma Vaswani. “To avoid further geopolitical and economic fallout, they need to dial down the rhetoric and the reciprocal tariffs … Both leaders are playing to their domestic audiences and want to look tough. But this is one of the ugliest splits the global economy has ever seen, and for now, the rest of us are just collateral damage.” David Fickling puts the emphasis on the “rhetorical” half of Karishma’s equation. “By basing a declaration of economic war on a half-baked formula waved around on a placard a few hours before the evening news, President Donald Trump sent a powerful signal to trade negotiators in other countries: Your best chance of getting this guy off your back is to give him the big dumb headlines he craves,” writes David. “A circumspect politician is going to be looking for policies that flatter Trump’s ego as a dealmaker, without offering any of the painful concessions that typically form the core of genuine trade agreements.” One of the few who thinks the US took the early upper hand was Hal Brands, although he’s skeptical it was the president’s self-proclaimed negotiating powers: “Just as Napoleon preferred lucky generals to good ones, Trump has landed in a potentially advantageous place against Beijing.” But over the longer term, the US leader faces his most dangerous nemesis: His own self-destructive impulses. “Trump is less a China hawk than an equal-opportunity protectionist,” adds Hal. “A president whose swerves surprise his own advisers might yet try to cut a big, beautiful deal with Xi, while returning to greater hostility against US partners. Every allied leader knows this, which will make them hesitant about following Washington down a path of confrontation with Beijing.” Yeah, those allies. Those “PATHETIC,” freeloading allies. The ones who together create the democratic web that is America’s greatest geopolitical strength and forge democracy’s foothold on mankind, and got a 90-day reprieve on tariffs for their efforts. Yeah, “hesitant” may not do it justice. “Trump’s crowd has spent the past 90 days (and more) making clear to Europeans it has no interest in keeping up existing security commitments without more in return – especially if there isn’t going to be a change on China trade. Why would the next 90 days be any different?” asks Lionel Laurent. “If Trump surrounds himself with new advisers who wield scalpels rather than flamethrowers, expect even more pressure on tech rules, China derisking and NATO spending — and more dividing and conquering of European allies. Clinging to the idea that Trumpism is a passing phase didn’t work the first time and won’t work now.”  Lionel thinks Europe also needs to take “a more clear-eyed stance on China” and “pursue an investment jolt at home rather than swap one dependency for another.” Matthew Brooker is of like mind. “Europe’s leaders, including those in the UK, have long been tempted to project hopes of prosperity-enhancing partnership on to China — a vast, faraway and sometimes mysterious country of seemingly limitless economic potential. The Communist Party has played astutely to this tendency over the past five decades,” writes Matthew. “That era is over. Under Xi, it has become clear that China hasn’t come to join the postwar global order designed by the US, but to reshape it in its own image.” As for post-Brexit Albion, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s challenge is pretty straightforward. In a world where one man’s caprice can trash markets and impoverish nations, how should other leaders respond? Cautiously, advises Rosa Prince. “History shows what happens when British PMs struggle to navigate the relationship with a dynamic US president. The best advice is to neither hug them too close, or go it alone,” Rosa writes. “Having failed to dodge the initial imposition of tariffs completely, the British government’s next aim of negotiating a swift trade deal with Washington to ameliorate their worst effects seems similarly doomed. Meanwhile, Trump will put pressure on the UK not to carve out alternative arrangements with China and the EU, or form an economic coalition of the willing with the likes of Canada, Australia, and Japan. But Starmer can’t allow him to dictate British trade policy.” Nor can his Continental allies — but can they retain the American security umbrella anyway? “It is possible that much of the economic damage of the tariffs can be rectified through negotiation and diplomacy. Perhaps America’s military partners may be able to compartmentalize the damage to economic relations and continue to be robust national-security allies,” writes James Stavridis. “But geopolitics and international relations so often turn on a combination of economic impact, personal animus and raw nationalism. That’s a lesson the Trump administration may learn, to the detriment of all our security.” Economics, animus and nationalism: From the Pass of Kleidion to Pearl Harbor, we’ve seen what that triumvirate can accomplish. There are worse things out there than Jar Jar Binks. Bonus Wartime Blues Reading: What’s the World Got in Store? A month ago, I joined my colleagues Lara Williams and F.D. Flam in deriding the efforts of Colossal Biosciences to clone a woolly mammoth. I take it back. That was then, this is a dire wolf:  Is that you, Ghost? Courtesy of Colossal Biosciences There are six reasons for my change of heart: Grey Wind, Summer, Lady, Shaggydog, Ghost and, especially, Nymeria.[5] They are the six “direwolf” pups adopted by the Stark family children at the beginning of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books that became HBO’s Game of Thrones. And I am going to choose to believe that even if the cute thing above won’t grow up to fight the Night King’s army, Colossal has made fantasy into reality at its “undisclosed location” (perhaps they have cloned the Godswood at Winterfell as well). However, F.D.’s skepticism remains untamed. “In a wildly misleading announcement for what is still an amazing achievement, researchers at a Dallas-based startup claimed they’d created dire wolves, a species that has been extinct for more than 12,000 years,” she writes. “The dire wolf announcement exemplifies today’s P.T. Barnum style of doing science, where projects are funded by billionaires and celebrities and the results are packaged to sell.” While scientists say the pups aren’t really the same dire wolves that roamed North America during the last Ice Age, F.D. admits, “they do represent an impressive feat of genetic manipulation that could usher in a new era of designer animals.” I personally can’t imagine anything more important than bringing Nymeria to life, but I suppose for most people, a machine as smart as a human — something known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI — would seem an even more impressive feat. Will it ever happen? That, writes Gideon Lichfield, may not be the right question. “If there is even such a thing as AGI ... it’s not going to be a sharp threshold we cross,” Gideon writes. “A core problem with the idea of AGI is that it’s based on a highly anthropocentric notion of what intelligence is. Most AI research treats intelligence as a more or less linear measure. It assumes that at some point, machines will reach human-level or ‘general’ intelligence, and then perhaps ‘superintelligence,’ at which point they either become Skynet and destroy us, or turn into benevolent gods who take care of all our needs. But there’s a strong argument that human intelligence is not in fact ‘general.’ Our minds have evolved for the very specific challenge of being us.” So take heart, fellow humans, we are saved from being enslaved by tomorrow’s robot overlords by the simple fact that we are all very flawed in our own very special ways. They may be able to clone a dire wolf, but they will never make another you.  “That’s not you.” Source: Reddit Notes: Please send dire wolf pups and feedback to Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net. | 
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