SOURCE: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 6/22/18

Trump has prided himself time and again on being a tough negotiator, but strong-arm tactics are likely not the best way to reach any sort of deal with Beijing, China experts warn, given that Chinese President Xi Jinping will not be willing to appear as if he's backing down against the U.S. president.

"You can't approach them in a publicly hostile way or they're not going to be able to respond to that," Bruce Andrews, a former Commerce Department official under the Obama administration, said at an event Thursday hosted by the Washington International Trade Association.

"There's nobody in this administration who is really looking at Chinese culture, Chinese practices, what's going to most influence Xi and how you bring it to a successful outcome," Andrews continued. "It's all brute force, and I don't think that's going to be successful, because that's not something that works well with Chinese culture."
Putting some pressure on China can be an effective technique, particularly as Beijing appears ready to make at least some changes, added Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

"Just not the type of pressure that we're putting on them — because it doesn't give them any negotiating room," she said.

Plotting potential paths forward for the U.S.-China trade war: Given that "both sides are getting themselves into a position where getting a negotiated outcome is going to be difficult," as Lovely put it, it's unclear where U.S.-China trade tensions are going next, and at least one round of new tariffs — and retaliatory tariffs — is a foregone conclusion, the panelists said.

But Derek Scissors, resident scholar and China economy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, offered one slightly more optimistic take: a deal later this year, before the U.S. moves to impose tariffs on the additional $200 billion in goods that Trump threatened earlier this week.

"If the Chinese had made more concrete commitments in the first round, we wouldn't have gotten to this point," Scissors said. "I think they will make them in the second round, and we will get purchases."

But, he added, that will only hold until the 2020 election begins in earnest. "When we get into the presidential election, we will have a protectionist, Democratic candidate saying, 'This is what Trump said in 2016, and this is what he did,'" Scissors said. "And what he did is going to see a larger bilateral trade deficit, no fundamental change in Chinese practices, and the administration is absolutely going to get raked over the coals."