Lyle Morris

The National Security Strategy was just released. Here is all the China-related content in one 🧵.

"President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China: namely, that by opening our markets to China, encouraging American business to invest in China, and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China’s

"China adapted to the shift in U.S. tariff policy that began in 2017 in part by strengthening its hold on supply chains, especially in the world’s low- and middle-income (i.e., per capita GDP $13,800 or less) countries—among the greatest economic battlegrounds of the coming

"We must encourage Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and other prominent nations in adopting trade policies that help rebalance China’s economy toward household consumption, because Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East cannot alone absorb China’s

"China’s state-led and state-backed companies excel in building physical and digital infrastructure, and China has recycled perhaps $1.3 trillion of its trade surpluses
into loans to its trading partners."

"A favorable conventional military balance remains an essential component of strategic competition. There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island

"A related security challenge is the potential for any competitor to control the South China Sea. This could allow a potentially hostile power to impose a toll
system over one of the world’s most vital lanes of commerce or—worse—to close and reopen it at will. Either of those two

"The Ukraine War has had the perverse effect of increasing Europe’s, especially Germany’s, external dependencies. Today, German chemical companies are building some of the world’s largest processing plants in China, using Russian gas that they cannot obtain at home."