On June 23, Leland Miller, nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Security Initiative and CEO of China Beige Book joined The Final Round to discuss the US-China trade deal and what it means for the current administration going into election season. Miller said that goals set by the trade deal, especially the phase 1B deal, are hardly obtainable, and that the deal is less of deal-breaker for US-China relations but more crucial for Trump’s upcoming election to see if he can fulfill his promise.
This was never a structural deal. This was never a deal that was going to hit the big issues in the US-China relationship. This was a deal that was going to run-up to the election, it was going to– it was going to ramp-up commodity purchases. And it will either do that or it won’t.
And if it does not, which is the way it looks post-COVID– and fails quite badly in missing the targets– then, again, the president’s going to have a decision to make. Can he defend a deal that’s failing in the midst of this anti-China onslaught?
