Opinion | Trump Takes On China and Persia at Once. What’s to Worry About?

Then we could sit back and let transformation emerge from within Iran, the only place it can emerge from, through its own people, who deserve better and eventually will get rid of this suffocating, rotten regime. Yes, it may take years, but we outsiders can’t rush Iranian history. Trying to force regime change on Iran right now could unleash disorder and refugees of massive proportions there.

Once we have Iran’s nuclear program curtailed for 30 years, our coldblooded interest is not to get any more deeply embroiled in this region’s pathologies. Israel can take care of itself. And we can arm the Sunni Arabs to keep Iran at bay. Sure, Iran is a bad actor, but Saudi Arabia murdered, dismembered and apparently boiled in acid the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and it’s been jailing women who pushed for driving rights.

The insight of Karim Sadjadpour, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment, should always be kept top of mind: “America has bad enemies in the Middle East. It also has bad allies.”

China poses a much more profound challenge. Quite simply, China grew out of poverty using a strategy of hard work, delayed gratification, smart investments in infrastructure and education and big investments in research and manufacturing the innovations of others. Alongside those, China also stole others’ intellectual property, forced technology transfers from companies doing business there, imposed nonreciprocal trade arrangements, provided huge government subsidies to its exporters and ignored World Trade Organization rulings.

If we were to allow China to use those same abusive practices it employed to dominate the manufacturing and assembly of low-margin, high-volume goods to now compete directly with us for the high-value-added, high-margin technologies of the 21st century — like 5G telecom, new materials, AI, aerospace, microchips — we’d be crazy.

But China’s current growth model — both its strengths and abuses — is central to keeping the Communist Party in power. It’s not something Beijing will abandon easily. That is why I believe the market is underestimating how difficult it will be to strike any transformational deal that gets China to fully abandon its abuses. And a small transactional deal won’t cut it.

And that’s why I also keep saying: This is no ordinary moment. This is the big one, folks. What’s at stake with Trump and China is what kind of global economy we’re going to have going forward. What’s at stake with Iran is what kind of global nuclear nonproliferation regime we’re going to have going forward.

The stakes simply could not be bigger, which is why I believe 2019 will be a pivotal year — like 1945 and 1989. I just hope it ends as well.

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