As the U.S. and China held trade talks in London on Monday, Stephen Moore, a former Trump senior economic adviser, told Newsmax that he's expecting a trade deal with Beijing to take some time to negotiate.
"The negotiations with China are very difficult to get to the goal line because China lies and they cheat and they steal," Moore said on "American Agenda." "So, it's really difficult to get them pinned down on anything. And, even if you do pin them down, you don't know if they're actually going to carry out with what they've agreed to on paper. I'd be surprised if they actually came up with anything very substantive at this meeting.
"China has really been hit hard by the tariffs that [President Donald] Trump has put into effect. You've seen those pictures of all the ships stuck in the harbors there and China with hundreds of billions of dollars of merchandise they can't do anything with. So, we'll see what happens. I'm not overly optimistic. I think it's going to take a long time to get a concrete deal with China."
Monday's talks between high-level delegations from the U.S. and China are an attempt to shore up a fragile truce between Washington and Beijing and follow negotiations in Geneva last month that led to a pause in the trade war between the two countries.
Since then, China and the U.S. have traded barbs over advanced semiconductors, rare earth minerals, and visas for Chinese students at American universities. Trump spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a lengthy phone call on Thursday that aimed to put relations back on track. While the U.K. government is providing the venue for the negotiations and the logistics, it said it's not involved in the talks.
Asked about the Trump strategy of isolating China and decoupling the American economy from the communist nation, Moore said it "makes a lot of sense to me."
"Hopefully other countries would do the same, decouple from China," he said. "We're dealing with an evil empire over there in China. They're a communist country. As I said, they steal a lot of our technologies. They're dangerous. They're building up their military in a very, very aggressive and dangerous way. So, we have to try to unite the world against China.
"You see that picture of President Xi there? I mean, that's a bad guy. He's a really bad guy, and we need to be ready. They want to take over from the United States as the world economic superpower. Of course, we can't allow that to happen."
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Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.