President Donald Trump was right to take on China — Tom Friedman, columnist for The New York Times said Thursday — but he could scuttle an eventual deal to "juice his base" for next year's election.
"I have to give him credit that he basically said, 'No one else would have done this but me,'" Friedman, 66, who joined the Times in 1981, told CNBC in an interview.
"And I think it's true. I'm a hard-liner on this."
Both countries need the "phase one" deal, which President Trump announced last month, to actually happen, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner said.
However, "There's a real worry there if they do stages two and three, which would require real domestic reform by [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, where he'd have to take some meat out of the state on industries, they're worried that Trump is so unstable as a political character that if he got close to the election and he needed to juice his base, he could turn over the whole table," Friedman cautioned.
"That's really the tension there between the short term and long term."
China said Thursday that Washington and Beijing would begin gradually removing tariffs.
But the countries have yet to reach an initial trade deal or select a location for Trump and President Xi to sign one.
Chilean President Sebastian Pinera last month called off the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Santiago later this month because of anti-government protests.
Trump and President Xi were expected to meet and discuss the possible "phase one" deal.
Friedman, who said he recently returned from China, told CNBC that the U.S. needed to take on Beijing directly "for three reasons, basically."
He explained: "China went from poverty to middle income, I think, using a three-silo strategy," with the first based on hard work, smart investments in infrastructure and education — and on "delayed gratification."
"Silo two was stealing others' intellectual property, nonreciprocal trade arrangements, noncompliance with [World Trade Organization] rules and forced technology transfer," Friedman said.
Lastly, he said, China had gotten for free the benefits of the stability that the U.S. Pacific Fleet brought to the region.
"They should have been paying for our presence there, because our fleet reassured all of China's neighbors that China could dominate them economically but not geopolitically," Friedman said, "which was very important for their economic expansion.
"If we let them use that same three-silo strategy to go from middle income to high income around AI, supercomputers, all these other things, 5G, we'd be crazy," he told CNBC.
"Someone had to call the game — and it's good that Trump did it."
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