I could not find a thread to post this
I read Trump's trade adviser's anti-China book. It’s wilder than you can imagine.
Peter Navarro doesn’t want you to buy anything made in China.
Photos: Getty Images, Photoillustration: Javier Zarracina/Vox
Peter Navarro doesn’t want you to buy toys that were made in China, because he believes they’ll poison your children. He doesn’t want you to buy pajamas sewn in China, because he thinks they could catch on fire. He doesn’t want you to buy phones that were assembled in China, because he believes they could literally blow up. In fact, he doesn’t want you to buy anything at all from China, because he thinks every dollar the country receives will be spent on trying to destroy the US.
Navarro isn’t the disheveled eccentric you might find lurking on the fringes of a demonstration, eagerly trying to stuff handmade pamphlets about the perils of globalization into your palm. He’s one of the most powerful economic officials in the Trump administration.
Navarro is the director of the National Trade Council, a newly created office in the White House. He’s one of the main figures shaping the administration’s trade policy as it struggles to balance the GOP’s traditional commitment to free trade with Trump’s stated belief that countries like China are gaming the system to improve their own economies at the expense of America’s working class.
The stakes in the new administration’s raging internal debate about trade are enormously high. If trade traditionalists like former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, win out, the way Washington does trade could carry on fairly similarly to the way it has for decades.
But if Navarro and White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon get their way, the Trump administration could potentially end up severely weakening the World Trade Organization and slapping big punitive tariffs on other countries in a forceful bid to restore American primacy in the trade world. Given that some of those tariffs could spark trade wars, it’s not an exaggeration to say millions of American jobs hang in the balance. It’s far from clear which side will ultimately prevail, but the president has
during
in the West Wing over how to move forward on trade.
Superficially, the two men couldn’t appear more different. Navarro is a Harvard-educated economist and tenured professor at the University of California with an eye for policy details. Trump is a brash businessman who loves being on television and proudly brandishes his ignorance of how public policy works.
But they have more in common than you’d think — indeed, Navarro’s personality has been
as a carbon copy of Trump’s.
<img src="
" alt=" ">
Navarro has a flair for showmanship and adversarial bravado, and he revels in defying the status quo. During his many unsuccessful runs for public office in California prior to coming to Washington, he developed a reputation for being less than fair in his use of smear tactics. “I still have some principles,” Navarro
in
San Diego Confidential in 1998. “But not as many as you might think because I don’t have any concern at all about making stuff up about my opponent that isn’t exactly true.” He’s already brought that ethos to the job,
vital allies like Germany of suppressing the value of the euro to gain a trade advantage over the US (something that Germany cannot, and is not, doing).
“They’re two peas in the pod, I’m telling you,” Beckie Mann, who managed Navarro’s unsuccessful bid for mayor of San Diego,
while comparing Trump and Navarro.
But their shared anxiety over China is where they connect most deeply, and it goes back many years. Trump lists Navarro's 2006 book
The Coming China Wars as No. 6 on his list of "
" he claims he’s read about China. Trump was also a big fan of
Death By China, Navarro’s 2012 documentary that was based on the 2011 book he co-wrote with Greg Autry by the same name. In fact, Trump’s praise for the film graces the top of
: “DEATH BY CHINA is right on. This important documentary depicts our problem with China with facts, figures and insight. I urge you to see it.”
The image below, which features a dagger labeled “MADE IN CHINA,” is an actual scene from the opening sequence of the documentary.
This is an actual scene from the opening sequence of “Death by China.”
I read
Death by China, Navarro’s most iconic anti-China text, to get a better sense of his worldview — and what Trump finds so appealing about it. It’s an important thing to understand, because Navarro will play a direct role in shaping the young administration’s way of approaching America’s only true global rival. He’s already delivered a speech on how
, and
on bringing down the trade deficit that Chinese president Xi Jinping, who is visiting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago this week, is sure to have read as an aggressive gesture. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment on this article.)
But it turns out that Navarro’s rabble-rousing in Washington about China and trade so far is fairly mild compared to the full scope of his beliefs about the country. Navarro is terrified by China, which he sees as a “heavily armed, totalitarian regime intent on regional hegemony and bent on global domination.” He looks at it through the kind of lens that Washington once considered the Soviet Union.
And he’ll be the first to tell you that the US should be ready to go to war with China at any moment.
Navarro is consumed by an existential fear of all things Chinese
Navarro possesses a striking blend of animosity and paranoia about anything have to do with China. In
Death by China, which he deems his “survival guide” to outmaneuvering “the planet’s most efficient assassin,” he warns the reader against ever purchasing Chinese products.
“Unscrupulous Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding world markets with a range of bone-crushing, cancer-causing, flammable, poisonous, and otherwise lethal products, foods, and drugs,” he warns.
At one point, Navarro asks the reader to engage in a cautionary thought experiment and — using a military phrase popularized during the Vietnam War — imagine that “your best friend is ‘fragged’ when the [Chinese-made] cell phone in his chest pocket explodes and sends bone shrapnel into his heart.”
Navarro also argues that investing in the Chinese economy is hugely dangerous for the US because China is a totalitarian regime fixated on becoming the world’s sole superpower. He accuses Beijing of using “weapons of job destruction” against the US, such as devaluing its currency in order to make Chinese products cheaper inside the US and make American products more expensive in China. It’s all part of a strategy, he writes, for China “to pick off America’s industries job by job.”
China’s ongoing military build-up, meanwhile, is so startlingly swift in Navarro’s eyes that he is sure the US is destined to perish at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party unless it starts becoming more aggressive with Beijing. He believes the Pentagon is not properly prepared for the reality that “China that can churn out hordes of ships, tanks, and planes on its factory floor,” and thinks defense spending needs to be more strategic to recognize that reality.
He also argues that Chinese cyberhacking operations against the US should be considered acts of war. “The ultimate policy question,” he writes, “is whether we are going to consider China’s ‘hacks’ as the acts of war they really are — or whether we are simply going to keep sticking our heads in the sand and see no Red Hacker brigade evil.”
Many of Navarro’s arguments stem from reasonable concerns about how the world should react to China’s tremendous rise from an economically dysfunctional country to a sophisticated manufacturing colossus that benefits from being plugged into the global economy but is reluctant to play by many of its rules.
To be continued
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54100021/peter_navarro_china__1_.0.jpg)
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8289381/GettyImages_150709929__1_.jpg)
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8289505/GettyImages_185776527.jpg)
