The Trump administration’s eight-month-long trade war with China could end within weeks, says Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“I’ve been involved in a lot of negotiations,” the top U.S. diplomat told Doug Wagner of Iowa-based WMT radio. “I am very hopeful in the coming weeks we’ll get that positive outcome.”
Pompeo repeated his prediction in an interview with Iowa’s KCCI TV. “I can’t tell you exactly how close we are, but real progress has been made for sure,” he told reporter Cynthia Fodor, who pushed Pompeo to be more specific. “I think we’re on the cusp.”
His comments echoed those of White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett, who said earlier Monday that the administration is nearing the “finish line” on a Chinese trade deal.
Pompeo is making the media rounds in Iowa while leading a rare diplomatic delegation to the American heartland, seeking to reassure farmers caught in the crossfire of the trade war. Trump imposed three rounds of tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese products in 2018. China retaliated throughout the year, imposing additional tariffs that targeted industries in political battleground states. Beijing’s tactics hit Iowa farms especially hard, but Pompeo stressed Monday that “lots of progress has certainly been made” in the talks.
“They can fall apart at the last minute for sure,” he cautioned on WMT. “But President Trump has been determined to get Iowa farmers a fair shake, to stop the Chinese from stealing their intellectual property and denying them the ability to compete by selling products into China. And this effort to get a full, comprehensive trade deal is to fix that, to rectify it, to make it fair, to fix this historic wrong.”
Some China hawks and supporters of the trade war have argued that the deal taking shape doesn’t include the most important changes the administration has been demanding.
“For Trump to get the structural reforms he wants and the country needs could take the rest of 2019 to negotiate,” Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist who had a falling out with the president, told the Wall Street Journal.
Pompeo maintained that any deal made with China would address fundamental disputes such as the theft of intellectual property.
“An Iowa company making farm implements that wanted to go sell in China, they’ll force that company to share that technology with a supplier or with another government-owned enterprise, and then they steal it and use it for their own, copy it,” he said. “It’ll ultimately be devastating for Iowans and for Americans if that continues, and President Trump is determined to fix it, to right that specific wrong.”
