The overall strategy of containing China, of hampering its economic growth, of preventing it from stealing our IP by basically cutting it off from world markets, has to be implemented with smart, cohesive tactics. A trade war is just like any other war. It’s not enough to know your objective. You also have to know exactly how to attain that objective in the most expeditious possible fashion. And herein lies the issue with regard to China. How fast you go and the measures that you take in order to box China matter tremendously. China absolutely deserves this. China is a geopolitical enemy of the United States. The pretend pussyfooting that’s been going on with a wide variety of administrations over the course of my lifetime with regard to China is wrong, and President Trump is the only president who’s had the courage to actually just confront it. He’s the only president who’s had the courage to say China is not just a strategic competitor, as Joe Biden said. They’re not a rising market that we need to find a way to integrate with, which was the view of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Donald Trump clearly recognizes that China is a geopolitical enemy of the United States, that they have been ripping us off. They’ve been stealing our IP. They’re spreading their tentacles all over the world. And they’re working with all the countries that hate our guts. President Trump has the courage to say the truth. Jordan Schachtel, an excellent foreign policy analyst, has a list of the various IPs that have been stolen by the Chinese over the course of the last ten years or so. Those include: F-35 Fighter Jet data used for China’s J-20 stealth fighter. Lockheed Martin F-22 data used for China’s J-31 fighter. Missile guidance to enhance Chinese missile systems. NASA space tech: hacked data on propulsion and materials research. Chip designs worth billions taken for China’s memory chip industry. Nuclear missile sensors. Infrared detection tech stolen for military applications. Boeing C-17 Data. Military transport plane specs hacked, linked to China’s Y-20. Apple’s Self-Driving Car Tech. Chip technology to advance Chinese semiconductors. Nuclear reactor designs. American radio systems. American semiconductor processes. Software code for Chinese tech firms. It is estimated by certain measures that China steals no less than $600 billion per year in American technology and IP — $600 billion per year. That is a massive number. So, yes, we should be seeking to contain China. Yes, we should be seeking to build an economic ring of fire around China. In order to do that, a few things have to happen. First, you need better alliances around China. That means better trade deals, better relations with Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, the entire Indo-Pacific region. It means better relations with the EU, which is a major trading partner for the Chinese. It means that you actually need to strengthen your alliances just like any other war. A trade war works like this. If you’re going to isolate China, you have to build better relations with everybody else on the planet so you can isolate China. This is what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been pitching. He says that President Trump’s strategy here is to isolate China in this way, to flip everybody against China so it’s the U.S. and all of our friends against China. The other thing that matters here is the strength of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency. That matters an awful lot. It matters because everybody is still trading in U.S. dollars, giving us leverage. If you cut yourself off from world markets, what you end up doing is reducing the leverage you have against other countries. Economically speaking, one of the amazing things that has happened in terms of American power over the course of the last 30 years has been the integration of global financial systems. It is what has allowed the Trump administration to successfully sanction the nation of Iran. The state of Iran has been sanctioned by the United States. Russia has been sanctioned by the United States through use of international financial mechanisms. WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show Doing these things is only possible because of the integrated nature of technological commerce in the modern era. It’s not just that the United States can say, “We’re not going to trade with Russia anymore. We’re not going to buy Iranian oil anymore.” It’s that the United States could threaten any bank or entity that did business with America with a cut-off if they did business with the Russians or Iranians, and that has a major effect. So, in other words, removing yourself from the international system actually damages you if you’re the most powerful country in the system. The United States is the most powerful entity in that system. It is the sun around which all of the other economies orbit. If we just disappear, if we just dissociate, that doesn’t increase our power, it radically reduces our power. Thus we need to increase our economic power. And that means greater integration with other countries economically, more integration into international financial systems that we control. This is how you build up the power to take on China, which is a rising power with the ability to truly throw a wrench into the global economy in amazing ways while stealing American IP. You also need to build up the American military. That means greater expenditure and different types of military tech. Shem Sankara, the chief technology officer for Palantir, which is one of the new defense firms that does business with the American government, said we need to reorient away from any of these big-ticket items in the American military that have a legacy, and instead orient toward new technologies that allows for the United States to defend the Taiwan Straits or break a blockade around Taiwan. That requires serious expenditure. It also requires serious oversight and requires a real military strategy, not just throwing things against the wall and not just assuming that America’s heretofore power is going to be its power dynamic going forward. So you need better trade relations with everybody and better military tech. And finally, you need the actual reshoring of national security-laden industries in the United States. That requires time. You can’t just do that overnight. There’s a bunch of stuff that we need that is made in China, including certain forms of semiconductors, including rare earth materials. All these things are necessary.  To fight this trade war, we need to put our ducks in a row, and tactics matter. You have to figure out how China will respond and what tools they might use. Tool #1: They could cut off rare earth mineral exports. They control 90% of global rare earth markets. They did that to Japan. It takes an average of 29 years to go from mineral discovery to production in the United States. But in China, where they don’t give a crap about the environment, they just drill it and get it in months. They go and get all that stuff in months. Tool #2: China could sell off a massive number of U.S. treasury bonds. China likely owns well over $1 trillion in U.S. bonds at this point. If China decided to sell off those bonds at bargain basement rates and just take the loss, it would destroy America’s capacity to borrow in the market, because bonds are a debt instrument. That would be a shock to the American system and crater the economy pretty much overnight. Tool #3: China could simply try to blockade Taiwan and hold the U.S. hostage until the tariffs were removed. They might not just blockade Taiwan, they could theoretically invade Taiwan. Blockade of Taiwan is the safer option for the Chinese because they would dare the United States to fire on their ships. If they blockaded Taiwan, the question is would the United States actually be able to or have the courage to break the blockade around Taiwan at the risk of a possible hot war with China? If China blockades Taiwan, all the semiconductors that are sophisticated semiconductors, all the stuff in your phone, your computer and our military tech, would be held hostage. One of the realities of the beginning of World War II in the Pacific sphere is that it was the Western cut-off of oil and rubber, largely to the Japanese, that created the impetus for the Japanese to invade Pearl Harbor. What the U.S. did had to be done, Japan was expanding its grip in Manchuria and the South Pacific. The tragedy of Pearl Harbor is not just that we were surprised. The tragedy is that we weren’t ready to fight back immediately, because FDR had not done the necessary work in order to ensure that we were ready to go to war at that time. It took a couple of years for the United States industrial complex to fire up such that it could actually take on a war. So all of this means everything has to move in lockstep. It means that when you take a trade policy that is likely to push in a more confrontational direction, you have to be ready with the iron fist inside the velvet glove. Economics is the velvet glove, military force is the iron fist. We need to have a very concerted strategy for how we go about that trade war with China, because international relations is a delicate business.