Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (D) doesn’t want the US to decouple our trade or our trade relationship with the People’s Republic of China. It’s sufficient, she claims in all seriousness to safeguard [our] technology to ensure [our] economic competitiveness.
It’s important that we get the bilateral economic relationship right, not just by protecting but also by actively promoting our economic interests in trade. We are not seeking the decoupling from China.
Why not? There’s a broader concern here, that Raimondo and the Biden administration at large, carefully ignore than merely protecting our technology and technology advantages. That larger concern is our independence of action on the world stage in “competition” with a nation with the avowed goal of overtaking and supplanting the US in the world—of conquering us, whether overtly or functionally.
That goal, that threat is given concrete, measurable effect by the PRC’s
- flooding the US with fentanyl and flooding Mexico with the components of fentanyl so that nation can flood US with fentanyl
- our dependence on PRC for Critical Items in our supply chain
- rare earths, which the PRC already has used in an attempt to extort Japan
- lithium
- cobalt
- intermediate components in assembly of computer chips, computers, cell phones
- overt threats against friends and allies, , Republic of China, Japan and Republic of Korea (East China Sea), nations rimming South China Sea
- 2017 National Intelligence Law that makes every PRC company a spy for the PRC government and for the CCP
- support for the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine
Trade with the PRC funds their military development against that goal of replacing us.
The PRC is an enemy nation, and we should be doing nothing at all to support its economy, its economic adventurism around the world, its intelligence-gathering efforts, its own technological development, its military expansion and expansionism.
That requires decoupling altogether.