‘Stealing people’s lunch money’: Chinese expert blasts Trump’s ‘bullying’ of India, ‘letters to penguins’
Dismisses Trump’s claims of India-Pakistan ceasefire forced by trade as leverage. “This was something beyond him,” says Einar Tangen from Beijing thinktank.
With a reset underway in the India-China equation in light of a hawkish trade policy by the US, a top Chinese expert in geopolitics has described Donald Trump’s imposition of high tariffs on India and others as “the biggest kid in the classroom going around and stealing people’s lunch money”.
He also dismissed Trump’s claims of having forced India and Pakistan into a ceasefire using trade as leverage.
“Trump was not a key player in this. This was something beyond him. And if you start looking at all the ‘wars that he’s ended’, they’re still fighting,” Einar Tangen, Senior Fellow at the thinktank Taihe Institute in Beijing, said in an interaction with NDTV.
He said there’s “lots of rhetoric” but the reality is different.
On tariffs, he remarked, “It is just pure bullying: The biggest kid in the classroom going around and stealing people’s lunch money. It’s disgusting.”
He mocked Trump further by adding: “He says that the US is not bullying the world. When you send out 180 letters, including to penguins, saying that you’re putting tariffs on them, this is not a diplomacy.”
The “letters to penguins” reference here is to the when the remote Australian territory of Heard and McDonald Islands was put on the list of Trump’s sweeping tariff plan, even though the islands have no human population but are known actually for their penguin population.
