Clint Eastwood’s magnificent “American Sniper” opens with a father teaching his sons that there are three types of people in the world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs.
Sheep like “to believe that evil doesn't exist in the world” and cannot protect themselves from it. Wolves prey on them. And a rare few are “blessed with the gift of aggression, an overpowering need to protect the flock.” These shield the sheep from the wolf: the sheepdog.
A well-known conservative, Eastwood is a Hollywood anomaly who — despite having been insulated from reality by years of the town’s excesses — still understands the real world.
China is a wolf. It has grown incredibly powerful incredibly fast and it is unburdened by the ethical constraints of Western democracies.
China has goaded our allies in the South China Sea, stolen U.S. secrets, and stolen millions of U.S. jobs. Beijing feels entitled to imprison and kill American informants, run roughshod over human rights, aggravate the North Korea nuclear crisis, and actively fund propaganda cells on the humiliating nightmare that our college campuses have become.
The rest of the Asian continent is too weak to oppose China. Most of Western Europe is too cowardly, though thank God that’s changing. The modern Democratic Party is a chaotic, race-baiting, America-hating mess. They are sheep.
Donald Trump is the sheepdog we need.
But because any direct military conflict would leave most of the world in ruin, Trump decided rather to stoke a trade war with China. This was the right decision, and it is working.
At least that’s the conclusion of a new study by EconPol Europe, a network of EU researchers who have found that U.S. companies and consumers are paying only 4.5 percent more after Trump slapped 25 percent tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods.
China gets to pay the other 20.5 percent.
Relying on his decades of business expertise, Trump targeted products with the highest price elasticity. (Democratic “rising stars” like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez probably couldn’t even tell you what price elasticity means without rushing to their phones.) So American consumers could either absorb the cost or find substitutes, but Chinese customers couldn’t do the same in return because of the vast difference in our nations’ per-capita GDPs: ours is a respectable #19 while China’s is a dreadful #108.
This has led to an $18.4 billion net gain in collected tariffs for the U.S. government. That’s called a win.
“Trump recognized the Chinese threat, unlike his predecessors,” as PJ Media wrote, who were perhaps too eager to collect campaign donations from companies wanting to enter the Chinese market. Trump didn’t care — he knew something needed to be done and he is doing it.
He knew America had to, because no one else can.
There are no internal checks to weaken a Chinese regime’s power: no free press, free speech, elections, opposing parties, competing branches of government, or uncensored internet. They don’t bear the financial burden of our preposterously generous immigration system, and have in fact been exploiting it for years. They force farmers into more productive jobs in cities while we bemoan the decay of our rural communities. They put on terrifying displays of national power while our subversive domestic influences desecrate a new national symbol each week.
Xi Jinping is so brazen he even forces Chinese Christians to replace pictures of Jesus with pictures of himself.
Leftists who insist that Trump is a dictator have zero understanding of the word. If they were to stage one of their insipid protests in China, they would be imprisoned, tortured, and possibly executed.
A cold trade war with China is better than a real war with anyone, and it’s one we’re winning. But we need to keep up the pressure. Despite the drop in the stock market since the Democrats’ successes on Election Day, President Trump has still delivered us the best economy in 50 years — that leverage can weaken Xi Jinping’s leadership and give China the humbling it needs.
Conservatives have long been champions of open trade. When their governments get out of the way and let them do business, two peoples can mutually benefit. That doesn’t mean, however, that the country in the best negotiating position in the world shouldn’t use that leverage to cut better deals with its trading partners — which is what Trump is doing. To continue to weaken China until it plays ball, Trump must continue making good deals with our allies: sort of a trading NATO in this economic cold war.
A trade war is an unusual tactic for a sheepdog to use, but Trump is an unusual sheep dog.
Jared Whitley is a long-time politico who has worked in the U.S. Congress, White House, and defense industry. He is an award-winning writer, having won best blogger in the state from the Utah Society of Professional Journalists (2018) and best columnist from Best of the West (2016). He earned his MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.