Daily SumUp

Today Trump suspended his global trade war with all countries except China. This confirms that, even as all eyes were on the chaos in the financial markets, the far bigger threat from Trump’s “liberation day” was a sharp escalation in the US–China conflict that could now plausibly turn violent within the next couple years.

Prior to Trump’s “liberation day” the two countries had an unhealthy relationship with steadily building pressures toward conflict. The Biden administration not only retained almost all of the first Trump administration’s antagonistic measures against China but expanded and intensified them. Though it eventually revived the diplomatic exchanges that the first Trump administration shut down, Biden declined to work with China to mitigate the zero-sum forces pushing the two countries against each other.