It’s China, Stupid!

For decades, the bipartisan consensus among Western elites held that free trade would bring peace, prosperity, and—somehow—liberal democracy to every corner of the globe. No country benefited more from this delusion than China. In 2000, Bill Clinton handed Beijing the keys to the global economy by backing its admission to the World Trade Organization, promising it would make China more open and responsible. The opposite happened. China never played by the rules. It stole intellectual property, subsidized its industries, manipulated its currency, and exploited every loophole it could find—while Washington looked the other way. And now, as those same elites wring their hands over Trump’s tariffs, they miss the point entirely: this entire “trade war” is about China. It always was.

It started with the hollowing out of American manufacturing. Entire industries packed up and moved to China, leaving behind shattered communities in the Midwest and Rust Belt. The elite consensus insisted this was just economic evolution, that cheaper goods were good for everyone. But what they didn’t say was that in exchange for those savings, the U.S. handed over its industrial base to a hostile regime.

Even as China broke every rule in the book, the same elites who championed engagement allowed the United States to become dangerously and systemically dependent on it for critical goods—rare earth minerals, semiconductors, military components, and basic pharmaceuticals.

This reality, and the true cost of that dependency, came into sharp focus during the Covid pandemic. The situation was so bad that the U.S. couldn’t even speak out against China’s cover-up of the pandemic’s origins because Beijing controlled the global supply of PPE, antibiotics, and other essential medicines. The most powerful country in the world was effectively muzzled—not by fear of war, but by a fear of running out of aspirin. America had walked straight into a strategic trap of its own making. And the people who built that trap are still the ones lecturing us on trade policy today.

This is the context in which Trump’s new global tariff policy must be understood. Ignore the pseudo-intellectuals breathlessly complaining about the details of Trump’s tariff formulas. This isn’t about fine-tuning trade flows or soothing think tank economists. It’s about ending China’s stranglehold on global supply chains and rebuilding U.S. industrial resilience. It’s about recognizing that the entire post–Cold War trade consensus was a catastrophic failure. China’s rise—economically, militarily, and technologically—came directly at America’s expense. The U.S. gutted its own industrial base under the fantasy that China would liberalize and everyone would benefit. Instead, it handed over factories, communities, intellectual property, and trillions in trade deficits to a regime that never had any intention of playing by the rules. Worse still, Washington didn’t just tolerate this—it encouraged and even funded it.

Nowhere was that naïveté (to say it charitably) more obvious than in the transfer of advanced technology to the Chinese military. Take the Covid virus, for instance. It traces directly back to this madness. The Wuhan Institute of Virology isn’t just a random lab. It is a recruitment hub for the Chinese Communist Party’s Thousand Talents Program and deeply entangled with the Chinese military. Yet the U.S. not only funded research there, including reckless gain-of-function work, but also shared advanced Western biotech to enable these experiments in the first place, including cutting-edge humanized mice. In return for handing over American technology to a hostile regime, we got a global pandemic. You couldn’t design a more self-destructive policy if you tried.

This pattern repeats across industries. China’s “green tech” dominance in solar panels and EVs was built on stolen IP and state subsidies. Its AI advances are fueled by Western academic collaborations and corporate joint ventures. The notion that if we just engage our enemies, everything else will fall into place, has turned out to be history’s most expensive self-own.

Trump’s tariffs have been called “crude” and “disruptive.” But that’s exactly the point. Precision tools won’t dismantle a system this corrupted. The goal isn’t to tweak trade flows. It’s to break China’s grip on global commerce and rebuild American resilience.

Some have scoffed at the global scope of the policy, asking why it targets the entire world rather than just China. To answer that, you have to rewind to 2018 and Trump’s first attempt to confront the China problem. Back then, he slapped tariffs on Chinese goods, but Beijing simply sidestepped them by rerouting exports through other countries. Exports from Vietnam to the U.S. surged by 300 percent, not because Vietnam became an overnight economic titan, but because Chinese firms shifted goods or production there to dodge restrictions. The same playbook showed up in Mexico and elsewhere. It became a game of whack-a-mole, and Trump learned the lesson.

What looks on the surface like a chaotic worldwide trade war is, in reality, a complete rewrite of the global trading system. And at the center of it is the need to economically isolate the most dangerous adversary the United States has faced in a generation: the Chinese Communist Party.

This isn’t speculation. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick practically spelled it out this week. Trump economic advisor Kevin Hassett did likewise. The goal is to fence China out of the global economy and force every other country to choose a side.

That’s why the new tariff regime is universal by design. It creates leverage. It forces countries to pick a side. If you want easy access to the U.S. market, you can’t serve as a pass-through for Chinese goods. You can’t have one foot in Beijing and the other in Washington. The U.S. is done playing dumb while its adversary exploits every open channel to weaken it from within.

Another thing Western elites and pseudo-intellectuals miss: this isn’t just about trade. It’s about national survival. How do you defend yourself against a country that makes your antibiotics? How do you lead in AI when China controls the rare earths inside your semiconductors? The Chinese Communist Party understands the game: economic dependency is geopolitical leverage.

These tariffs are a battering ram—not a fine-tuning tool—meant to shatter the old system and build something new in its place: a global economic order that isolates the Chinese Communist Party, rebuilds American industry, and forces U.S. allies to choose between aligning with the United States and its economic opportunities, or siding with a hostile, expansionist regime bent on global subjugation.

The threat from China won’t be countered with slogans or summits, but by pulling every economic lever to cut it out of the global trading system it has exploited from day one. There is no national security without economic security—and no economic security without a full and final reckoning with the Chinese threat.

It’s China, stupid! Everything else is noise.