China Morning Missive
Here is a picture that is the outcome of recent American foreign policy, primarily the Trump trade policy. A picture, as well, that will send the entirety of the Beltway consensus to lose its collective mind.
If you are unaware, there is a large annual meeting taking place in China called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The group was established over 20 years ago and is meant to coordinate geopolitical agendas throughout what was termed by Halford Mackinder “The World Island”, or basically all of Eurasia.
Essentially, it is the precursor to the “Global South”.
What we have today, literally today, is a meeting on the sidelines between Xi, Putin and Modi with the later making his first trip to China in over seven years. China and India have had real issues over both trade and national borders. Now there has been a thaw.
A total of 26 different nations will be in attendance as well.
The point of all the commentary here is a demonstration that China planned accordingly and did so over multiple decades. There was a tremendous degree of luck involved too. America made a host of geopolitical missteps over the past two-plus decades allowing for China to gain ground.
And now we have the Trump trade agenda so blatantly alienating India that there is now the real risk of a rapprochement with China.
From a geopolitical perspective, this could easily go down as the single largest mistake made by Team Trump. While India is probably seeking to play both ends against the middle here and work to have Washington ease off the applied 50% tariffs, I just don’t see Trump – the man – willing to capitulate. He hates the TACO moniker and with that will be less than willing to negotiate.
Now we wait for Wednesday and the even bigger Chinese military parade. I’ll get to that later in the week. Expect to see the headlines though. Washington is going to lose its mind once again.
