The Trump administration’s declaration of economic war on China was no doubt dismaying for Beijing, but its ramifications spread further. For the United States to be declaring China, the main driver of global growth, to be a national security threat upended one of the basic assumptions of the post–Cold War world. Contrary to the flat-world presumption of globalization, the United States was making the nationality of firms, Chinese or not, fundamental to Washington’s willingness to allow them to access American technology. And though it had acted unilaterally and without warning, America
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