By Mike Gallager – Japan undergirds U.S. power in the Pacific. It has one of the world’s largest economies …It’s time to take a lesson from Mr. Ohtani and swing for the fences, moving beyond a narrow focus on sectoral trade deficits. America must build new institutions designed to defend both countries from the Chinese Communist Party’s economic aggression, the way our alliance already defends us from Chinese military aggression.
Economic aggression has generated China’s trillion-dollar—and growing—trade surplus, backed by suppressed domestic demand, subsidies for strategic industries and intellectual-property theft on a staggering scale. Joining forces with Japan against this aggression would move trade talks … to the more productive question of how to regain or preserve dominance in shipbuilding, semiconductors and software. Read More