The United States is the world’s biggest deficit creator

Note: The following article is taken from the Chinese-language "Commentaries on International Affairs".

Making unfounded accusations is an approach the United States habitually takes when attacking its rivals. And that’s exactly what has recently happened in relation to China.

[Photo: IC]

Right before the eleventh round of bilateral high-level trade consultations, the United States abruptly suggested that China had backtracked in trade negotiations, which it later used as an excuse to raise tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent, on 200 billion U.S. dollars of Chinese exports to the United States. But the normal process of negotiation is founded on the repeated to-ing and fro-ing of ideas, before a final consensus is reached. Given that by then no agreement had been finalized, how could the U.S. possibly accuse China of backtracking?

Rather, it is the United States that has been going back and forth on its own words. On May 19 last year, China and the United States issued a joint statement announcing that they would aim to reach a consensus on avoiding a trade war. But ten days later, the White House suddenly turned its back on that consensus, announcing that it would impose an extra 25% tariff on 50 billion U.S. dollars’ worth of goods imported from China. In December last year, both sides reached a consensus on the quantity of China’s purchases from the United States, but Washington subsequently kept increasing its demands until once again waving the tariffs stick, consequently causing setbacks in the trade talks.

In order to deter China's development and maintain its declining hegemonic power, some U.S. politicians have spared no effort in resorting to deliberate misrepresentation to defame China, accusing it of economic aggression, intellectual property theft and pursuing global hegemony, and floating another raft of ‘China threat’ narratives.

All these unfounded charges are intended to cover up the fact that the United States is de facto the world’s main deficit creator.

The world is witnessing changes as never before and humanity is facing both new opportunities for technological revolution and industrial transformation, and also turmoil caused by unpredictable "black swan" and predictable "grey rhinoceros" incidents. The international community is faced with challenges brought about by deficits in the aspects of governance, trust, peace, and development. As the world's leading superpower, the United States has been making almost no contribution towards eliminating these deficits. On the contrary, it’s becoming their main creator.

This has been self-evident as Washington pursues its America First policy, placing its own interests over and above international rules, withdrawing from a variety of international treaties, causing severe damage to multilateral systems and aggravating the deficit in global governance. In 2017, a research report on WTO dispute rulings found that the United States was by far the largest “unruly” actor in not complying with WTO rulings. Two-thirds of the violations leading to WTO arbitration were committed by the United States. Professor James Laurenceson, the deputy director of the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney, has said that the U.S. government is treading a dangerous path that violates WTO rules and will cause serious consequences to the global economy.

In the meantime, the United States, taking a zero-sum approach, has severely damaged the foundations for trust and cooperation in international society with such actions as building walls along its border with Mexico, stirring up enmity in the Middle East and backtracking on major issues including climate change, laying a fuse leading to escalating global economic and trade frictions and increasing geopolitical tensions.

The United States is also good at muscle flexing. It has been aggravating the current global deficit in peace by sending troops to Syria without the approval from the United Nations, deploying military forces in the Gulf region to confront Iran, and conducting the so-called “freedom of navigation” operations in what it regards as disputed waters. U.S. military spending has so far exceeded 600 billion U.S. dollars, and the budget for the fiscal year 2020 will reach 750 billion U.S. dollars, much higher than that of any other developed country. As such, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has pointed out sharply that the United States is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

In order to maintain its economic and technological hegemony, the United States has been waving its tariffs stick around against its major trading partners across the world, hitting foreign high tech companies such as China’s Huawei and deliberately severing global value chains, which has aggravated the global development deficit. In April this year, the International Monetary Fund lowered its forecast for global growth this year to 3.3 percent, warning that it could slow down further due to such factors as escalating trade tensions.

The world today should have been an era witnessing a shared future for all nations and regions. President Xi Jinping has proposed a community of shared future for all mankind. All countries should participate in governing global affairs, composing international rules, sharing development, and grasping the destiny of the world. The power politics of one big winner taking all has long been cast onto the bonfire of history. What the United States has been doing goes against the historical trend and the popular will, and also worsens the deficit in the governance of global affairs, becoming the most destabilizing factor in world development.