The column – public & private
The United States and China have announced that they had taken a further step forward in the search for a new mutual balance on international trade.
If what has been declared is confirmed, Chinese exports to the United States will be subject to a 55%duty, while American ones towards China will remain at 10%.
China will remove the export constraints of rare materials and lands, fundamental for electronic applications. The United States, for their part, will abandon the threat of not admitting more Chinese students in their universities.
It would seem a victory for Donald Trump: the introduction of significant asymmetrical duties, one of the objectives initially declared strongly, now seems to have been accepted.
In spite of the apparent chaos that seems to characterize American commercial negotiations, with everyone the equipment of bombastic declarations, sudden changes of course, abrupt arrests and sudden accelerations, the result that begins to emerge instead is instead solidly and concretely rooted on clear and rational interests that perhaps we do not share (and which certainly can damage Europe) but that the two parts, mutually, try to promote and defend.
It is in fact extremely interesting that the aspects relating to the rare and access of Chinese students to American universities, two exemplary elements and the heart of mutual dependence between the two countries, has been particularly interesting to clarify.
The United States depend on Asia and China for their own needs in the electronics sector, not only to have phones at sustainable costs, but also to find the raw materials necessary to produce them on their own.
China, for its part, despite the impressive changes of recent years-that have led it to reach, and in some cases to overcome, the western technological level-still needs the European and American know-how if she wants to achieve its historical objective to return to being fully on par, if not higher, compared to the western world, as has always been in its history with the exception of the last two hundred years. It also still needs international trade as a outlet market for its products.
The United States and China are now like a couple in which the spouses endure with difficulty, but which, for economic reasons, still need each other.
The agreement therefore seems to represent, for both parties, a act that a gradual and consensual separation is still preferred to a conflictual divorce.
The goal of making itself fully independent of each other has not been abandoned, but the times and methods will be calibrated.
So what awaits us in the future and what does it mean for us Europeans?
We will certainly continue to see periodic disagreements, the intensity of which will depend on how quickly the two countries will actually know how to make themselves independent on each other.
It will still take a long time. For the United States it will be neither easy nor short to reconstruct its own home industry in numerous and various production sectors, abandoned for some time. China still needs time to fill the technological gap with us.
In all this, Europe seems to remain at the window in the hope that a world will return, that of globalized trade and European centrality, which will hardly return.
If China has really accepted asymmetrical duties, the European position towards the United States of “zero against zero” duties will be difficult to travel, if not perhaps possibly at high costs on some other counterparts, also simply because to prevent commercial triangulations would require a level of duties from our part towards China similar to the American one.
Globalization and economic interdependence have produced wealth but also inequality and fragility. Above all, they need the trust that the commercial chains necessary to support it remain stable and open in the medium and long term. Otherwise, they produce fear.
With the events of the last few years the trust has cracked, if not already lost. To reconstruct it it will still take time.
It would be better that Europe would therefore put its heart in peace and started to reason in practical terms of strategic independence. This means creating the conditions for a whole series of basic and strategic productions, such as steel, chemistry, electronics, they are possible and competitive even by us.
Time is now.
