Nice hat, Mr. Trump; where did you get it?

I read with interest a recet letter to the editor, claiming that the previous president stood up to China. Apparently like he stood up to North Korea and Russia. All talk and no positive action; rather each of these countries was handled with such ineptitude that we ought to be ashamed as a nation. The idea that China is a Communist country is of course nothing new; we have been dealing with them since Richard Nixon opened up relations in the 1970s. They certainly are authoritarian, but they are not fools. They are happy to make all sorts of goods for the rest of the world and are using their economic power to influence other countries, in many cases quite clumsily.

I am amused to read the writer’s assertion that it is the globalists who empower China. It is you and I and all of the rest of the country that buys Chinese made goods that provides China with markets for goods they make. The “globalists” he mentions are in many cases U.S. companies who have worked with China for decades to make products cheaper, and increasingly of higher quality. Those companies seem OK with looking the other way at the human rights abuses and political coercion, I guess because for them it is profitable.

The Chinese were capitalists millennia before the United States existed. They are very good at it. Talking tough did nothing to change that; it only made us look like fools following a so-called leader who had no idea about what to do with China, other than to make his brandnamed junk there on the cheap. Lots of talk about confronting China, but when it came down to it, his cute red hats and ties all came from there. What a surprise.

Kenneth MacDicken

Monroe