Hello my name is David Runtzeman and this is Talking Politics. We've got an extra episode

this week because Adam twos is in town and we always like to catch up with him on his

latest thinking and today we're going to be talking about China America and trade wars.

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So once we're recording this on a Friday morning, not a Wednesday morning, last night Donald

Trump imposed the latest round of sanctions on China. Adam, we don't know where this is

heading even over the weekend but what for you is at stake here? Where's the big risk?

I think there are different levels. There's the spectacle of the trade war that Trump needs

to keep rolling onwards. This is a man who has promised to deliver a mega deal, the biggest

deal ever with the Chinese and that's one dynamic that's driving this. There are specific

issues over which the Chinese and the Americans are wrangling about levels of Chinese subsidy,

intellectual property rights protection and so on. That's another dimension. But in the

background, I think, is lurking now a momentum shift on the American side which points us

much more towards a sort of not a new Cold War. I don't find that analogy all that helpful

precisely because the economic relationships are so entangled. But the assertion, if you

like, of a security policy agenda over the top of economic policy and I think that's the zone

where the tension is at least easily reconciled and where we can see a real qualitative shift from

the two decades of the 90s and the early 2000s where it was a kind of economic free for all really.

In the spectacle, as I understand it, part of what we've been through now is a kind of dance where

...