Signs that the US government may launch a trade war against China are bargaining chips being used by Donald Trump’s White House to force Beijing to do more to contain North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, a US political scientist and bestselling author said. Graham Allison, a former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, told the South China Morning Post that unless China takes significant action to constrain North Korea “in next few weeks,” the US will hit China with unilateral trade measures “early in the new year.”
“If the Trump administration undertakes these unilateral initiatives, the Chinese government has already said it would retaliate,” Allison cautioned. “So we could – in six months – find ourselves in a trade war.” Allison argued in his book, Destined for War?, that war between the US and China in the decades to come is “much more likely than currently recognized” unless the two nations find an escape from the “Thucydides’s Trap.”
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