President Donald Trump‘s biggest flaw this term has been his willingness to roll over or look the other way for China, with his TikTok negotiations being one of several examples.
On Monday, the White House revealed the details of the deal it cut on TikTok that would allow the app to continue to run in the United States after months of negotiations with China. Per the deal, control of the app will become a joint venture controlled by Americans, with security provided by Oracle. The TikTok algorithm will now supposedly be controlled, inspected, and retrained by the American side of this joint venture. Trump repeatedly violated the TikTok divestment law that was on the books in order to reach this deal.
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More importantly, and more worryingly, China agreed to the deal. The same China that would have rather shut the app down in the U.S. than allow ByteDance to sell it for a profit and give up control of the algorithm has actually agreed to this arrangement. Does anyone really think this is a good-faith compromise by the Chinese Communist Party, and that the CCP won’t try to undermine or circumvent whatever security measures are provided by the American side of this joint venture?
Trump continues to give China what it wants through his actions or inaction. The trade deal Trump wants would allow 600,000 Chinese student visas despite China using its students as spies. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, “Chinese nationals studying at American universities or working in American research facilities frequently engage in state-directed espionage efforts to unlawfully export innovations or destroy American findings.”
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Meanwhile, the Trump administration is doing little more than watching as China gets more aggressive in the South China Sea. Trump is also having the U.S. take kickbacks from Nvidia in exchange for allowing the company to export artificial intelligence chips to China. As Trump said when talking about his Chinese student visa goal, “We’re going to get along with China. But it’s a different relationship that we have now with China.”
This seems a lot less like “getting along with” China and more like giving China a lot of things it wants in exchange for what exactly? Some sort of trade deal? Shrugging off multiple national security concerns in exchange for manufacturing exports is not a winning trade for the U.S., especially as China remains hostile to American interests and the concept of freedom and prosperity that America represents.
