China threat is worse than trade deficit: Steve Hilton

The Trump administration is threatening to raise tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods after U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin accused Beijing of reneging on concessions they previously agreed to as part of the new trade deal between the U.S. and China. 

The raised tariff would affect nearly 6,000 products from electronics to car parts to breakfast cereal and is likely to hurt U.S. consumers as well as the Chinese economy.

The administration plans to use the tariffs to punish China for what it calls unfair economic practices.  But the host of Fox News Channel’s “The Next Revolution,” Steve Hilton, told Fox Business on Tuesday that the U.S. has more to worry about than a trade deficit.

“I think this whole thing could be a case of the President doing the right thing for the wrong reasons,” Hilton told Kennedy.

While Hilton agreed that the loss of U.S. jobs and intellectual property to China are important issues to tackle economically, he believes “that’s part of an even bigger issue, which is the fact that China has a clearly-stated aim to be the dominant power in the world.”

Hilton said that China’s search for economic prosperity comes at a cost because “this is not some open democratic regime that we would be happy with dominating the world, it’s a brutal, authoritarian dictatorship.”

Hilton pointed out that China has exerted its influence through detaining an estimated 1 million to 2 million Uighur Muslims in harsh “re-education camps”, and forcing countries around the world to be indebted to China’s government for infrastructure costs as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.

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Hilton warned that China is “a real threat to global stability and actually hitting them where it hurts with the economy… is very, very good at checking the rise of a power that we don’t want to see dominant because it is such an authoritarian regime.”