🇺🇸RICHARD D. WOLFF:

"The problem of the United States and its manufacturing sector is much larger than this relationship between the United States and China.

It is probably more accurate to say that China has become the scapegoat, the way for the leadership here in the United States to focus the upset of the American people about the loss of manufacturing on one particular country.

But that is a strange argument.

The decision to move manufacturing industry out of the United States, particularly over the last 30 to 40 years, was made by the corporate leadership of American industry.

One of the places that both U.S. and foreign capitalists moved their manufacturing was to the People's Republic of China.

The reasons were very simple:

Number one, the wage level in China was much lower than the wage level in the United States, Western Europe, or Japan.

And number two, China, with its huge population and its rapid economic growth of the last 30 years, was the world's largest and fastest-growing market.

The same is true in Vietnam, Brazil, and to more or lesser degrees in many other countries.

This is the normal market-driven, profit-maximizing behavior of capitalists.

To blame it on China is bizarre.

Every president out of the last 10 has campaigned on reviving manufacturing.

Bush did it, Clinton did it, Obama did it, Biden did it. They all promised it, and none of them has achieved it.

So it has become a kind of empty promise of American politics, Republican and Democrat alike.

This is what they must say, so they say it.

But what they can do is very little because the position is determined by conditions over which American leaders do not have control.

They do not control the wages around the world.

They do not control the growth of markets around the world.

By the way, you can see it also in that many presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, will tell you, 'Over my presidency, we added 6 million manufacturing jobs.'

Technically, it's true.

What it leaves out is that you lost 8 million, and that's been the history we've actually seen.

And I would argue further that I don't see much prospect for manufacturing to come back to the United States.

Even the turn towards economic nationalism that we are seeing in the United States and in other countries is partly a process that will take a long time.

In order for the United States to once again become a manufacturing economy, it would have to compete with the rest of the world above all at the level of wages and the benefits workers get in this country.

And that's going to take a long time because the wages in the United States are still significantly higher than in most of the rest of the world—less so than in the past, the direction is there, but it'll take time.

If Mr. Trump resumes his program from his first period as president—namely to apply high tariffs to Chinese exports to the United States—if he does that, it will, of course, raise prices inside the United States because Americans buying Chinese goods will have to pay the price China charges plus, in addition, the tariff implied by Washington that goes to Washington.

That means prices will go up.

Well, that's not good for the inflation.

The United States has a problem with inflation.

Mr. Trump campaigned for president on a program of fighting inflation.

If he's going to fight inflation, he can't apply tariffs to China, and if he's going to apply tariffs to China, it's going to make the inflation worse, not better.

We have no idea how this contradiction is going to be handled at this point.

Mr. Trump renegotiated the legal agreements between Canada, Mexico, and the United States that he would tariff against Canada and against Mexico.

If Mr. Trump goes ahead with his plans, it will do major damage to Mexico and to Canada.

What will be the result?

One of the things they're for sure thinking about—and maybe already doing—is revisiting their relationship with the People's Republic of China because they're going to offset the damage done by the United States by becoming closer economically with China, which is not what the United States wants.

That's the contradiction of United States policy over the last 30 to 40 years.

American capitalists have invested huge amounts of money in the People's Republic of China, and they did so with the intention and the plan of producing not only for the Chinese market but for the global market.

They are not interested in economic nationalism. They are opposed to it.

On the other hand, you have those American industries that are threatened by the competition from China.

They want the government to be more nationalist to protect them against Chinese—and not just Chinese but global—competition.

There is a conflict inside the United States which reaches all the way up to the Trump administration and exists in both parties, the Republican and the Democrat, in which there's an ongoing struggle between those who want a good economic relationship with China and those who do not.

That is being fought out every day, usually not in the public view—quietly in conferences, in think tanks, in books and articles written and circulated.

One day—and it may be soon—these will explode into the open, and then everybody will see it."