דיפלומט אמריקני לשעבר: המטרה כעת היא לבודד את סין, אבל המטרה של טראמפ לאורך כל הדרך הייתה להפוך את הסחר להוגן יותר עבור ארה"ב

And joining us now to discuss President Trump's tariff strategy and how it relates to China is Bart McCoy, former presidential campaign advisor and former U.S. diplomat. Bart, thank you so much for joining us. Good to see you again. Now, markets rallied today after Trump announced the 90-day pause on most countries while hiking tariffs on China even higher. How are you reading Trump's strategy here? Was the goal all along to isolate China? I think the goal now is to isolate China, but I don't think that was the goal all along. Here's the secret about Donald Trump. I've heard people saying, aha, see how clever he is. It's three-dimensional chess. This is what he was after the whole time. All those other tariffs, those were just to set things up, to set up China for a fall. No, Donald Trump does exactly what he says he's going to do. When he says, I want to do this, that's what he wants to do. His goal all along was to make trade more fair for the United States. That was his goal. China is resisting. And so now his goal is to make an example of China. And he can't do it to the whole world at once. Nobody can do that, not even America. And so he's saying to everybody, okay, 90 days, 10%, just to get some income and to even the trade barriers and to even the relationship, even out the playing field. But this is all about making sure that there is a new understanding about how world trade works. Now in the opposite sense of China, we see Japan and South Korea lining up to negotiate. Taiwan and Vietnam have also signaled moves to cooperate. In terms of Vietnam, though, China has used countries in the region like Vietnam and Cambodia to skirt around trade rules with the U.S. in the past. Do you see these countries choosing to work with the U.S. while squeezing China out? What will that kind of economic landscape look like? Well, that's going to be hard for a country like Vietnam or Cambodia. They're next door neighbors. They're small countries. China has enormous influence on them. However, they are the go-to alternative for a lot of American products that are currently manufactured in China, especially Vietnam. And they would have to get some kind of security guarantee, not a military one, but some kind of confidence that we will take care of them. They will have to pursue their interests. That's what Trump is really doing here. He's looking at the world trading system and says, okay, this was sold to us as a rules-based order of trading. Nobody but us has been obeying the rules. It's like you're playing football and every time you set the ball down, the other team grabs it and runs off and scores a goal. And so Trump is saying, I'm not letting go of the ball anymore. It's not a rules-based system. Every country has to look out for its own interests. We're looking out for ours. You countries look out for yours. And China is the big bad wolf in this. China has half of all of the trade surplus in the entire world. Half for one country. They're cheating everybody. And Donald Trump is saying, I'm not taking it anymore. How about the rest of you?