China, you know, positions itself as a leader of the global south.

You know, used to be called the developing world and that's global south.

They are out there offering clean energy solutions that are affordable to the rest of the world.

And the U.S. is like, here, buy some LNG.

Hello and welcome to Why's this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, we're getting news recently of trade deals, although in many cases they appear to be way less than advertised.

A lot of times these trade deals are not deals in the formal sense you might think of.

There's no paper on the deals.

It's like a handshake deal between two nations.

One thing that keeps cropping up is that Trump will come out and say something about the deal. Like in Japan is going to

give us $500 billion and we're going to keep 90% of the revenue and they're going to get 10.

And you're like, okay, well, that doesn't, what even are you talking about?

But also, why would they agree to that? And then, you know, a day or two, a news cycle goes by and then, like, you have to read and translated foreign press. And then eventually the American press, the Japanese are like, no, we never agreed to that. What are you talking about? That's crazy.

This keeps happening in place after place. So whatever all these quote unquote deals amount to

really remains to be seen. Like it's just actually not clear what has been agreed to,

what's going to be enforceable, and what's going to happen. But the biggest of them all is the

U.S. China trade relationship. And, you know, the quick history here was that the U.S.-China trade relationship.

And, you know, the quick history here was that the U.S. announced these enormous tariffs on China.

China responded with retaliatory tariffs.

U.S. responded with even more tariffs.

We had about four weeks of essentially a kind of complete embargo between the two nations

in which the tariffs were so prohibitively high that there was no trade. That's when we were covering the empty ships that were coming across, the empty ports. And then they struck a deal. The U.S. and China struck a sort of temporary deal. We said, okay, we're not going to do this. We're going to go back to higher than normal, but not crazy tariffs between these two countries while we work out a deal.

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