The fact that the president came into office with essentially no understanding of, or experience with, foreign policy continues to become more and more of a problem for the world, as time goes on. What makes it worse is that it’s not as though the president has indicated that he’s open to changing his ways to be more in line with established precedents, such as the idea that trade wars are overall something we want to avoid.
Instead, the president has marched straight ahead into a trade war with China, imposing and threatening tariffs left and right. Now, in the face of China looking to a long established organization’s mechanisms to serve as the mediator for the conflict, the president has taken to Twitter to further escalate the conflict.
Early Friday morning, he wrote on Twitter:
‘China, which is a great economic power, is considered a Developing Nation within the World Trade Organization. They therefore get tremendous perks and advantages, especially over the U.S. Does anybody think this is fair. We were badly represented. The WTO is unfair to U.S.’
It remains remarkable that the man who somehow made it to be the president of the United States thinks that it is acceptable and fitting for him to make grandiose policy pronouncements via social media.
As a background for this tweet, The Washington Post reports that just yesterday, on April 5, China sought to use the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement process to end the burgeoning trade war between them and the United States.
Now, with the president’s angry early Friday morning tweet, we have our answer for what the president thinks about that option. He prefers angry tweets to established diplomatic processes.
He has already run into a roadblock in his punitive campaign against China in the World Trade Organization. As The Post also notes, he had to cast an initial round of tariffs on steel and aluminum imposed last month as necessary for our national security in order to get around regulations put in place by the organization.
The president initially made little indication that he planned to exempt even our closest allies from those tariffs, earning him widespread opposition. He eventually relented and granted exceptions to the tariffs for jurisdictions like Mexico, Canada, and the European Union.
He has not relented, however, in the case of China. As recently as Thursday night, the president threatened to impose a new round of tariffs on a total of about $100 billion worth of imported Chinese goods. In turn, on Friday China insisted that it will “counterattack with great strength” in the case of those newly threatened sanctions actually being implemented.
Those two latest angry statements from the respective countries at play here are the latest in a tit-for-tat chain of events stretching back to the initial announcement of those tariffs on steel and aluminum.
As recently as Wednesday, the president found it in himself to insist that we are not in a trade war with China, posting a message to that effect on Twitter.
He has alternated between that claim and one that trade wars can somehow actually be a good thing for the United States.
Check out Twitter’s response to the president’s latest ranting below.
Featured Image via Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images
