Hype of Trade War, Myth of Cold War Win
You can never win any war against your adversary, trade war or financial war, psych war or real war, cold war or shooting war, without a military force overwhelming him. This is common sense. The British proved it in the Opium Wars one hundred fifty years ago when it used gunboats to overwhelmed China. The US proved it when it used gunboats to force Japan to open trade with it in 1853. N.Korea proved it in 2017 when Little Rocket Man exploded his H-bomb in response to US bluffs and a hapless Trump could only twittered his "fire and fury like the world had never seen". And Iran proved it when the Turban Man shot down an expensive US spy-drone among US bravadoes, and what an embarrassed Trump could do was to talk about possible Iranian human errors. All of these cases prove just one thing: You can never get more at the negotiation table than what you could possibly get in the battlefield with a dominant fighting force. This is truth. This is the basic law governing international negotiations. Every normal man knows it, except only a "stable genius" "with great and unmatched wisdom".
The US doesn't have any qualification to demand China to make changes on anything related to Chinese sovereignty, be it how SOEs operate, or how RMB is managed, or how "Made in China 2025" is implemented. These issues are sovereign to Chinese. And they can be changed only through sovereign ways by the Chinese. For a foreigner to demand China to make these changes, he must have the ability to force Chinese government work for him, or overthrow Chinese government at his will. This is obviously impossible. The US doesn't have the ability to engineer a regime change in China by either using military force, or instigating social unrest. It also doesn't have the ability to enforce its trade policies over China, if it can't win a shooting war against China in the battlefield. Without trade policies enforcement, any win in a trade war through negotiation is meaningless. To enforce your trade policies over your adversary, you must have the ability to stick your big guns at your opponent's head. Does the US have such a magic power to do so with China? Absolutely not. If the US couldn't win the Korean War seventy years ago when China was dirty poor, forget about ANY WAR against China today in China's domain, period. This is why the US will never be able to win the trade war, no matter who is in charge of the White House, and no matter what kind sanction is used against China.
You might want to use the collapse of Soviet Union to argue that the US could win the trade war against China without fighting a hot war. Come on, you're too naive. The USSR wasn't defeated by the US. It was defeated by itself. What the US did was simply to pick up a rotted apple from the ground and to claim it had won. The US certainly can claim it has won the cold war because the USSR is dead. But using it as evidence to argue the US could win the Trade War is simply idiotic. It is Gorbachev who killed the USSR with his fantasy for Social Democracy, and it is the USSR itself which committed suicide with its poor management of economy and profound corruption. It had little, if not nothing, to do with the US. If you don't agree, let's examine a hypothetical case. Could Putin claim that Russia had won the war against the UK with Brext and Scotland Independence? Certainly Putin could, since British further disintegration is inevitable and since Scotland Independence is deemed to occur. But we all know Putin's claim is funny and unsustainable. British disintegration is a rotted apple fallen on the ground, and all Putin does is to walk towards it, bent over, pick it up, and tap it with a playful comment. That's all. How the apple gets rotted, and how the rotted apple fell on the ground, they have little, if not nothing, to do with Putin.
