Andrew Small is a senior transatlantic fellow with the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He has written extensively on China and is author of The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics. In what the Economist has described as the ‘new Cold War era’ – tensions between the US and China on trade are at their highest level in decades, with President Trump having imposed tariffs worth over $200 billion – threatening to take these up to $500billion – on Chinese imports and the Chinese have vowed to retaliate. GVS Managing editor, Najma Minhas asked Andrew to share his thoughts on how the current tensions in US-China relations would affect Pakistan.

GVS: What is your understanding of what lies behind the USA-China trade war?

Andrew Small: There are two ways to see this, one way of understanding the US-China trade war is to see it through the prism of the broader Trump administration trade agenda, which has brought the United States into clashes with friends and allies as much as it has with rivals. On this reading, the ultimate aim with China is to reach a deal to rebalance trade to better suit US interests – as it is with Korea, Mexico and other cases. The alternative way of thinking about it is that the China case is different.