US 'haphazard' policies give no upper hand in trade negotiations with China: economist

In a social media post Wednesday, Trump announced that China will make it easier for U.S. companies to obtain much-needed magnets and rare earth metals, while the U.S. would stop efforts to revoke visas of Chinese students. This came following two days of high-level U.S.-China trade talks in London on Monday and Tuesday.

In early April, China, which controls 90 percent of the global processing of rare earths, imposed export restrictions on some minerals and magnets, which are essential for everything from cars to fighter jets, and critical to American industries and defense.

Jeffery Sachs, professor at Columbia University, described the developments as a walking-back of the United States' erratic tariff war launched at the beginning of Trump's second term.

"The whole episode of recent weeks was a big cost of disruption and uncertainty. It still weighs in the world because every day, U.S. policies change. They're very haphazard. They don't have a long-term fixed point. They are not strategic and today the U.S. so wanted the rare earths and the magnets and it got them in return for making concessions the other way," the economist said.

He underscored that Trump's waging of the trade war in the first place makes clear that the U.S. president formulates policy based on an outdated view of world affairs.

"The United States doesn't know what to do because, look, China's very successful. It's going to remain very successful. This goes against the American game plan of primacy, which is an anachronistic idea that the U.S. runs the show. The Americans can't quite get it out of their heads that they don't run the show anymore. It's not that China runs the show, it's that we're in a multipolar world. And so we are still having these eruptions where America is trying to show how tough it is, how strong it is, how indispensable it is. But it ain't! So this is why we are back to square one in this sense," he said.