“War Room” co-host Natalie Winters noticed national headlines were eager to tout China’s decision to reduce its painful embargo against U.S. soybean farmers as a kind of “win.” But this was no win.
"Soybeans are a solid proxy for how the United States deals with China: small, transactional, immediately legible 'wins' pitched as strategic breakthroughs. A shipment resumes, a statistic ticks up, a headline declares progress. Meanwhile, Beijing quietly continues accumulating long-term advantages," Winters writes in The American Conservative, adding that "Even after this supposed thaw, U.S. soybean exports to China remain down roughly 99 percent from historical levels. Despite all the hype, China is on track to register its lowest share of U.S. soybean exports since 2002."
When President Donald Trump resumed power last year he immediately re-ignited his tariff trade war with China, sparking yet another soybean exclusion against U.S. farmers. The farmers, who largely voted to elect Trump to both his first and second terms, were furious that their top international buyer of soybeans now gets most of its supply from elsewhere due to Trump's tariffs.
“This president sold America's farmers out," said farmer and rancher John Boyd, who is also the founder of the National Black Farmers Association.
Trump and Chinese leaders only recently hashed out a deal to loosen the Chinese lock-out of American soybeans, but Winters is astounded that administration officials and the press are flagging this as success.
“The soybean theory rests on a simple insight: America evaluates success through events, while China evaluates success through positioning. We ask whether something happened. They ask whether something became permanent,” said Winters. “China doesn’t need to win negotiations. It shapes the environment in which negotiations occur. That means controlling inputs, bottlenecks, and systems that persist regardless of who occupies office in Washington.”
In past negotiations China has pledged to purchase a certain percentage of U.S. goods and services, but in practice, China “never came close to meeting its commitment,” with independent tracking finding that Beijing fulfilled only about 58–60 percent of its promised purchases across 2020 and 2021.
“There were no meaningful penalties. The deal expired. The headlines moved on. China’s industrial assault on America continued,” said Winters, adding that, in any case, soybeans are merely a “symbolic gesture to absorb attention while larger, irreversible gains continue elsewhere.”
This includes China’s growing monopoly on rare earths, which Winters said accounts for “roughly 60 to 70 percent of global rare-earth mining and more than 85 to 90 percent of global processing and refining capacity, giving Beijing leverage at both the extraction and transformation stages.”
“While America negotiates deals and pushes unpopular cultural programs, China accumulates leverage. And through all of this, Washington keeps falling for the soybeans. Still,” said Winters. “Empires do not collapse because they fail to negotiate. They collapse because they lose the ability to distinguish between tactics and strategy, symbols and structure.”
“Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned,” Winters added. “America celebrates soybeans while the architecture of the world is quietly being rearranged.”
