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After almost a year of an escalating trade war, U.S. President Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea last week. While official statements from both sides framed the summit as a positive move forward in a period of growing political, economic and military tensions on the international scale, it in some ways appears to be a distinct change in the U.S. approach. The Trump administration had imposed extremely high tariffs on Chinese exports to the US this year. China then imposed its own retaliatory tariffs.
But despite Trump’s triumphalist language around the meeting, the U.S. continues to place economic restrictions on China. It will restrict China’s access to NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell generation of chips, despite CEO Jensen Huang saying last week he hoped to be able to sell the chips in China. And the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments this week about Trump’s tariffs against Chinese and other international goods, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington ruled over two months ago, on August 29th, that the President overreached his executive power in imposing the tariffs by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Ultimately—and despite a perhaps temporary lowering of temperatures—the trade war is far from over and may spill into other significant geopolitical areas. Why has the Trump administration made this apparent shift? We get into that and more in this episode.

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About the Author


Rachel Hu is a journalist with “BreakThrough News,” a new independent media project, where she hosts the podcast “It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism.”
She is also a host on WBAI 99.5FM in NYC and has been an anti-war and anti-racist activist with the ANSWER Coalition for the last decade.
Rachel can be reached at: rachel@wbai.org.
Chris Garaffa has been an anti-imperialist and social justice organizer since joining the movement against the Iraq war in 2003.
Chris is a weekly guest on Sputnik Radio’s “By Any Means Necessary,” and co-hosts the podcast “The Reboot,” focusing on the intersection between technology and human rights.
Chris can be reached at: chris.garaffa@gmail.com.









