Michael Pillsbury: Tariffs Are ‘Just a Pin Prick’ Compared to What’s Needed to Halt China’s ‘Predatory Policies’

Brietbart: Michael Pillsbury, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, described the Trump Administration’s implementation of tariffs on aluminum and steel imports as insufficient measures towards curbing China’s goal of displacing U.S. geopolitical global dominance.

Pillsbury joined Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour for Friday interview focsuing on national security threats related to China’s geopolitical ascendance on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight.

Tariffs on aluminum and steel imports from China should be part of a broader strategy towards restraining China’s hostile geopolitical ambitions, suggested Pillsbury.

“It’s pretty widely believed that the tariffs won’t change China’s overall predatory economic policies,” said Pillsbury. “What I try to expose in one of the chapters in The Hundred-Year Marathon is how China built the kind of policy machine it has today with its economy, and they’re deeply committed to a set of economic policies that involves subsidizing large companies that they call the national champions. These companies as recently as fifteen years ago, none of them on the top 500 companies in the world list. Now 100 of them are.”

China’s economic policies are violative of its commitments as a member of the World Trade Organization, said Pillsbury.

“They have a series of techniques they use that involves dumping products [and] buying raw materials with the help of the government,” explained Pillsbury. “It’s a set of behaviors which they promised they would never do when President Clinton let them into the World Trade Organization. So fairly recently, President Trump has denied them what they wanted; they wanted to be called a free market economy and then qualify for lower tariffs worldwide from all countries, but President Trump, and of most of the European countries, the Japanese, all have denied China to be considered a free market economy, which they’re not.”

“So, the steel tariffs, as you know, were a  matter of great political struggle inside the White House,” added Pillsbury. “We had the departure of Gary Cohn, and perhaps others, who oppose tariffs of any kinds.”  more here