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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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April 16, 2025

Trump vs China, Again

After a week of tariff chaos, the US has settled into a concentrated trade war with China. President Donald Trump levied tariffs on China during his first presidency; now, rates are much higher, as Trump has announced 145% tariffs on Chinese imports. Beijing, for its part, has responded with 125% rates on US goods.
 
Who will win this standoff? On the question of which superpower can better withstand the pain, views are mixed.
 
On one hand, China depends much more than the US does on exports, which stand to be harmed, as investor Steve Eisman noted to CNN’s Laura Coates. (Exports account for 19.7% of China’s GDP, per the World Bank; for the US, that figure is 11%.) “The US, of all developed countries, is the most insular economy of all,” Eisman said. “Look, nobody’s going to do well in a trade war … but if you’re asking me which country is in the best position to withstand a trade war, hands down that’s the United States.”
 
Some commentators focus more on consumers. In a Foreign Affairs essay, Adam S. Posen argues that, currently, the US needs Chinese goods more than China needs the US market. In Posen’s view, it was irresponsible for the Trump administration to seek to eliminate that trade deficit without first creating domestic sources for the very things the Trump administration wants to make instead of import, like pharmaceuticals, cheap microchips, and critical minerals.
 
Consumer demand in China could be part of the equation, too, as it will help determine how well China can cope with Trump’s tariffs by redirecting goods for domestic consumption. In a Financial Times op-ed, Arthur Kroeber of China-focused macroeconomic research firm Gavekal Dragonomics writes: “China may be losing demand from the US, but this can be replaced by domestic consumer demand, which has been abnormally weak thanks to overly tight monetary policy, and an obsession with pouring state resources into manufacturing. [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping has reversed course and is now serious about boosting domestic demand.” That said, low Chinese consumer demand has been a major story in the world economy since Beijing lifted its draconian Covid-19 lockdowns only to discover that domestic consumer pessimism had become entrenched.
 
The two superpowers are jockeying for trade supremacy in talks with other countries, too.
 
The US now plans to use the trade war—and the myriad tariff negotiations it will spark—as a venue to pressure countries to limit their dealings with China, The Wall Street Journal’s Gavin Bade and Brian Schwartz report, citing unnamed sources. “The idea is to extract commitments from U.S. trading partners to isolate China’s economy in exchange for reductions in trade and tariff barriers imposed by the White House,” the Journal reporters write.
 
Xi, meanwhile, is on a sort of victory lap of capitals in Southeast Asia, where he has presented China as a champion of trade stability in contrast to Trump’s America, the Lowy Institute’s Susannah Patton notes in a Nikkei Asia op-ed arguing Trump’s tariff war could enhance China’s influence in the region. Then again, China’s neighbors may not be swayed by the outreach. As Mary Gallagher writes for the World Politics Review, Vietnam trades heavily with China, but it benefited from the US–China trade war during Trump’s first presidency because manufacturers relocated to Vietnam as a result of it. Plus, Gallagher writes, China “may be hamstrung by its own record of economic coercion in the past as well as its inability to offer anything that replaces Washington’s fundamental competitive advantage: the U.S. consumer.”

How Beijing is

‘Digging In’

On Sunday’s GPS Fareed talked with Lingling Wei, The Wall Street Journal’s chief China correspondent, about how Beijing is reacting to Trump’s sweeping new tariffs on Chinese goods—and what it means for broader US–China competition.

A Swiss Cheese

Tariff War?

Now that Trump has imposed 10% tariff on imports from around the world, delaying much higher rates while leaving himself open to counteroffers, Fareed predicts dealmaking—and corruption—will follow, as countries and companies seek exemptions. A mess of lobbied-for loopholes will likely result, in Fareed’s view.
 
That process appears to have begun.
 
In keeping with Trump’s goals, Japan is now reviewing nontariff trade barriers Trump doesn’t like, including auto and agricultural regulations, Rieko Miki reports for Nikkei Asia. At the same time, Trump has backed off other elements of his trade war, apparently unilaterally. The president has exempted smartphones and computers from his latest tariffs (while leaving in place the 20% rate he had applied to Chinese imports earlier, citing fentanyl as a national-security concern), and he is also considering a pause in auto tariffs. (Auto tariffs haven’t quite bitten US consumers yet, says trade expert Bill Reisch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. When a US tariff on auto parts takes effect on May 3, car prices could go up. For now, Trump’s tariff applies to finished cars, and stockpiled inventory still awaits buyers.)
 
Trump appears willing to spare particular imports from tariffs not because foreign governments have offered concessions, but because those imports matter to US consumers, Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman writes.
 
“Trump will have to hope that it is not a hot summer because about 80 per cent of the world’s air conditioners are made in China; along with three quarters of the electric fans America imports,” Rachman writes. “The White House will certainly want the trade war to be over by Christmas because 75 per cent of the dolls and bicycles that the US imports are also made in China. Can all this stuff be made in America? Just possibly. But it will take time to set up new factories and the end products will be more expensive. Trump hates bad headlines and will want them to go away. So rather than endure the pain of shortages and inflation, he is likely to add more and more items to the list of goods that are exempt from tariffs.”

A Chance to Defeat ISIS for Good?

At the Middle East Institute, Charles Lister writes that although ISIS persisted in Syria throughout the country’s civil war, the fall of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime has offered an opportunity that should not be squandered.
 
“With Assad’s departure,” Lister writes, “ISIS lost its long-standing and vitally important safe haven in Syria’s central desert and its most significant driver for recruitment. The results—so far—have been dramatic. In 2024, ISIS was resurgent in Syria, conducting an average of 59 attacks per month, but since Assad’s departure on Dec. 8, 2024, its operational tempo has fallen by 80%—to just 12 attacks per month, on average. … These changes will prove fleeting, however, if Syria’s new reality is not managed well. Ultimately, ISIS’s durable defeat will come about only if Syria’s transition succeeds—with the formation of a government that represents all of the country’s rich diversity; with an economy that is given air to breathe through sanctions relief, substantial investment, infrastructure rehabilitation, and reconstruction; and with the gradual demobilization of a society over-militarized by nearly 14 years of brutal civil conflict.”