CHINA/ECONOMY/JAPAN/TRADE DEALS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Donald Trump’s plan to make the American economy great again is deceptively simple: wrestle jobs, market share and indeed the future back from China. But what if the U.S. president, in the process, morphs America into Japan? Three decades ago, Trump the real estate mogul railed against Japan-style tariffs and a zero-sum view of economic relationships. Japan, in the midst of its own economic boom, had ‘systematically sucked the blood out of America’ and American manufacturing, he said in a 1989 ‘Morton Downey Jr. Show” interview. ‘They have gotten away with murder. They have ended up winning the war.’ Now, it’s China that is ‘raping’ America, in Trump’s telling. When Trump told ‘Good Morning America,’ in November 2015, that the Chinese ‘want to take your throat out, they want to cut you apart,’ his comments smacked of déjà vu to Japanologists…But ironically, as Trump girds for economic battle with China, he is making many of the same mistakes Japan made in the mid-1980s, leading to its current stagnation. Rather than opening the economy, embracing new ideas and technologies, and welcoming competition, Trump has pushed protectionist gimmicks, currency manipulation and tax cuts aimed at the 1 percent—an approach that risks walling off the United States from a global economy racing forward.
-William Pesek, “How Trump’s Obsession With China Could Turn America into Japan,” Politico, May 23, 2018