Washington Wants a Trade War on China. The World Is Not Buying It.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent arrived at the G20 summit with an ambitious plan: rally America's allies behind a coordinated trade and currency campaign against China. He left without the coalition. What Bessent wanted was something like a new Plaza Accord — a concerted push by major economies to correct what Washington sees as China's chronic currency manipulation and its $1.2 trillion trade surplus. What he got was polite refusals from nearly everyone he asked.

The original Plaza Accord of 1985 worked because the five nations involved — the United States, West Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan — all agreed that correcting the dollar's overvaluation served their interests. The math was simple enough to produce consensus.

The math in 2026 is not simple, and consensus is nowhere. Bessent's pitch essentially asked ASEAN economies to accept slower export growth and currency appreciation in exchange for solidarity with Washington against Beijing. Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia all declined. Their trade with China is too large, and their ambitions are too bound up with Chinese investment and supply chains, to risk open economic confrontation.

Africa's response was similar. The continent has spent two decades building infrastructure financed by Chinese capital. Joining an anti-China economic front would mean jeopardizing those relationships for the sake of an American trade dispute that does not obviously benefit them.

This is the reality Washington keeps stumbling into: the Global South has not chosen China over America so much as it has chosen not to choose at all. Its governments want access to both markets, investment from both sides, and leverage from playing neither against the other. An American demand for alignment is precisely the kind of pressure they have learned to resist.

China's position in this dynamic is structurally strong. A $1.2 trillion annual trade surplus means Beijing has enormous capacity to sustain its current economic posture. It does not need the coalition that failed to materialize in order to survive American pressure, and it knows it.

The US tariff wall on Chinese goods, already well above 100 percent on many categories, has not produced the supply-chain decoupling Washington hoped for. American consumers and manufacturers have absorbed higher costs. Chinese exporters have rerouted through third countries. The headline numbers look punishing; the underlying trade flows have been more resilient.

The failed G20 push tells us something important about the limits of American economic statecraft in the current era. The United States remains the world's largest economy and the issuer of the global reserve currency. But those structural advantages no longer automatically translate into the ability to organize others against a rival.

A generation ago, Washington could credibly threaten to close its market to countries that did not cooperate. Today, many of those countries have diversified their options enough that the threat carries less weight. And an America that is simultaneously running large fiscal deficits and demanding that others revalue their currencies against the dollar is asking for a sacrifice it is not visibly making itself.

None of this means China has won the trade confrontation. Its own structural problems — a consumption deficit at home, overcapacity in key industries, and an aging population — are real and unresolved. But winning a trade war requires building a coalition, and Bessent's G20 experience suggests that coalition is not coming.

If Washington wants leverage over China's trade behavior, it will have to find it through means that do not require the rest of the world to take sides. That is a harder problem than any Plaza Accord would have been, and the G20 just made it harder to ignore.

​Original Article In Chinese

（Related： Beijing and Moscow Coordinate Cognitive Warfare Operations Along First Island Chain ｜ Latest ）