Much as today, America is not unprovoked. Among the provocations is Beijing’s deliberate tolerance of the mass export of fentanyl from China to the US for more than a decade. It’s a reverse opium war which has fed America’s deadly opioid addiction.
Xi Jinping in recent years has made some limited efforts to curtail the trade to placate Joe Biden and Trump. But China is considering withdrawing even this modest effort, according to well-informed online musings which China’s censors are allowing to run, implying the idea could be acceptable to the regime.
The US oil embargo on Japan in 1941 is not an exact analogy for today, but it is a warning from history. Trade decisions on this scale are not about trade alone.
The American shutdown of oil supply persuaded Japan that it needed to smash through the embargo by force if it wished to survive economically.
It launched its attacks on US and British interests throughout the Pacific, including the Pearl Harbour raid, and the Pacific theatre of World War II was born.
The oil embargo was one step in a series of escalations on both sides, much as Trump’s de facto embargo is an extension of the cold war that has been developing between Beijing and Washington for a decade.
The consequences of today’s economic war are unpredictable, but we know one thing already. Trade is conducted for mutual benefit. It’s win-win. Its political cancellation is lose-lose. Americans will be forced to pay higher prices and their economy will shrink, while China will suffer a traumatic blow to some $US400 billion a year in export earnings.
All other nations will be forced to salvage what they can from the destruction of one of the world’s greatest trade flows.
That’s what wars military, economic or both do.
“Normally and generally,” write historians Will and Ariel Durant in their 1968 classic, The Lessons of History, “men are judged by their ability to produce – except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.”
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