Commenting on tit-for-tat, former People’s Republic of China People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang offered this at an economic forum in Tokyo last December:
Tit-for-tat trade retaliation [he said] is “never a good choice” from an economic perspective…. “But there’s not much policymakers can do about that.”
He’s right on the first of that, but tit-for-tat is a terrible tactic in any venue, economic, military, political or other. The far better move, the only serious move, is to retaliate through escalation, escalating far higher and far faster than the enemy can adapt and respond. And keep on with that until the enemy adjusts his ways in manners suitable to us.
Yi is mistaken, though, in his claim that policymakers can’t do much. Of course, they can: they’re the ones who push the tit-for-tat retaliations and who should push escalatory retaliations.
An American general once said about getting into a fight: “Bring a gun, and bring all your friends with guns.” Use overwhelming force—economic, political, military, whathaveyou—to end the conflict the most quickly and the most favorably to you. Not a fair fight? Irrelevant. What’s not fair is losing the fight and having our national, economic, international behaviors dictated to us by the winner of that fight.
It’s time to get off the dime and move, promptly and at pace, to cut all economic ties with the PRC, whose stated goal is to overwhelm, replace, and dominate us. The PRC has already made its opening moves, cutting us off from the rare earths we need to manufacture our national defense systems, from weapons to computers, and flooding Mexican cartels with the precursors of fentanyl for the latter to produce and ship into the US along with mixing into what used to be legitimate medicines produced in Mexico.
It’s time to stop selling rope to the PRC.