Nothing to Buy
During a recent visit to her office in the Little Havana district of Miami—and after an inordinate amount of chin scratching—my doctor dispatched me to the underworld: the lab. A place of ominous machines, mysterious beeping, and needles lurking behind every door.
I was placed in the competent hands of a thirty-something medical tech—a bundle of energy, a pure delight—who hooked me up to one of those machines and, between some chin scratching of her own, engaged me in a most charming conversation.
She was first-generation Cuban-American. Her parents had come over in the Mariel Boatlift. Cuba was in the news due to its perennially failing economy. So we talked a little Cuba.
She and her family were living the American Dream. Her words, not mine. Her dad was a contractor—and busy. She and all of her siblings had families, good jobs, nice cars—owned their own homes.
At family gatherings, she told me, everyone speaks Spanish, even her own kids who were very young. Everyone speaks Spanish, but everyone also speaks English. Indeed, her English was perfect, accent-free, and probably better than my own.
I asked if they ever go back. Did she have any relatives still living in the old country? And I lit a little firecracker.
"My grandmother still lives there," she said. In a little village outside of Cienfuegos. "My dad goes to see her every few years."
"Every month," she continued, "all of us chip in and send her a little money. But she told us to stop. 'Stop sending me money,' she said. 'There is nothing to buy.'"
That one sentence—there is nothing to buy—contains more economic and geopolitical analysis than all the PhD dissertations or think tank white papers in all the world. Here you have the paradigm of a strong family banding together, pooling resources, solving the collective action problem and, in Cuba at least, money has no value, no meaning, because there is nothing to buy.
But we know that’s not true. There are things to buy in Cuba. There must be. Cuba’s political elite live like kings. Like millionaires. Palaces. Private jets. Untold wealth stashed in foreign banks.
But wait—wasn’t the United States supposed to fix this? Sixty-five years ago and periodically ever since, the U.S. has tightened the screws on the Cuban regime.
From trade restrictions in 1960 through the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, the U.S. was always right on the verge of throwing the bums out and restoring freedom and democracy to the people of Cuba. It has been proclaimed from the floor of the United States Senate, so it must be true, right?
And yet, my young friend’s grandmother combs the hills looking for berries, prays for rain so her little garden might grow, and butchers the occasional chicken.
Is there a better empirical example of the undeniable fact that sanctions don’t work than Cuba? Is the political elite there packing its bags? Searching for asylum in some safe haven?
No! They’re more entrenched than ever because that is the effect of sanctions.
Always, sanctions hurt the people they are intended to help and help the people they are intended to hurt.
But it never fails. When confronted with this or that mostly manufactured crisis, politicians, desperate to appear as if they’re doing something, fail to lead but instead fall back on the standard political pablum: economic sanctions.
The Full Trump
Which brings us to President Trump and China.
There is no need to rehearse the details of the Trump tariff regime here. It’s too ad hoc, too ever-changing and incomprehensible, to write about with any confidence. Even in the off chance I managed to get it right, it would probably change tomorrow. And again the next day.
Suffice to say that even after "pausing" tariffs on most of the world, as the reality of the bond market imposed itself onto the president’s fever dreams, China still gets the full Trump.
As it stands, the U.S. has slapped tariffs approaching 150% on imports from China. China has responded in kind, with triple-digit tariffs of its own and new restrictions on exports of key minerals critical to U.S. manufacturing.
Effectively, trade between the U.S. and China has ground to a halt.
I bet that’s got Xi quaking in his boots. Huh? Betcha now he knows who’s boss.
The China Boom, Then the Xi Freeze
The economic arc of China is decidedly different from that of Cuba—but the same principles apply.
Since President Nixon opened diplomatic relations with China in 1972, and especially since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the Chinese economy has exploded. Growth has averaged nearly 10% per year. Hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty.
China has, during that time, become the world’s factory and export manufacturing boomed. But the profits from all this economic activity have stoked demand for those things at which the U.S. excels: Boeing jets, Otis elevators, Oracle software, the NBA.
But the boom, while not quite bust, has cooled, as all export-fueled booms must. (See 1980s Japan. Take note, President Trump.)
Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012 and installed himself as the Cartoon Dictator for Life, growth has slowed and now flirts with stagnation. China faces a real estate crisis. Bank failures. Demographic decline.
Xi has cracked down on tech giants, built out a surveillance state, and codified censorship as state policy.
Sound familiar? (Twitter Files, anyone?)
An autocratic government faces a fading economy. A strongman whose grip on power is starting to slip—at the margins.
So what does Trump do? Throw him a lifeline.
Now, Xi has just what he needs: a foreign enemy to blame for every domestic misery and a citizenry ready to rally to the flag.
Just like Castro’s Cuba.
With one very important difference: 1950s Cuba was a desperately poor, agrarian society, fully dependent on a tourism trade that Castro shut down, and Soviet largesse.
China, by contrast, is an economic and industrial powerhouse with the world’s second-largest military. A regional hegemony who can wait out Trump and whomever follows along in his tiny little footsteps. Indeed, it has already begun the process of transitioning from an export-dependent economy to one, like that of the U.S., that incentivizes domestic consumption.
China could very well emerge from this trade war stronger—or at least no weaker.
The China Hawk Gospel
But of course, we’re told there are good reasons for all this economic theater. Big, serious, strategic reasons. Not the usual political nonsense—this time it’s about national interest.
First, there’s cheating. Currency manipulation, export subsidies, state-run mercantilism—Beijing, we’re told, plays Monopoly while we’re still learning Candy Land. And maybe that’s true. But if the answer to bad economic behavior is self-immolation, I’d like to return my Milton Friedman books for a refund. Please.
Then there’s the sacred chant: intellectual property. China steals tech. China demands joint ventures.
Yeah. China reverse-engineered my PalmPilot back in 2004 and I still haven’t recovered.
Okay. But let’s not forget: most U.S. companies voluntarily handed over their tech in exchange for market access. Nobody held a jade dagger to Apple’s throat and made them build iPhones in Shenzhen. They ran the numbers and believed they were getting the better end of the bargain. From the look of Apple’s stock price in the last two decades, I’m thinking they were right.
And finally, the big one: national security. The phrase that ends all arguments and that transforms basic economic policy into high-stakes existential chess. "It’s not about trade," they say. "It’s about Taiwan." Right—because Xi will definitely back off now that we’ve slapped a tariff on tee shirts. That’ll show him.
Let’s not kid ourselves: Xi doesn’t need America’s permission to want Taiwan. He already wants it. The only question is whether he thinks he can get away with it. And here’s where tariffs become more than just stupid—they become dangerous.
Because economic decoupling isn’t neutral. It’s not some safe hedge. It’s not "de-risking." It’s provocation. By torpedoing trade, we make the case for confrontation. Xi gets to say, "Look, the Americans have already decided we’re enemies. They’ve crippled our exports, banned our tech, and are trying to collapse our economy. What have we got to lose? They hate us. Oh! And they’ve dozens of military bases on our border."
We’re not deterring war. We’re making it easier to justify.
Meanwhile, let’s talk about those chips. Taiwan produces over 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, yes. And losing them would be catastrophic. But you know what else is catastrophic? Destroying global trade networks, wrecking your own industrial base, and lighting your supply chains on fire—all before a war starts. If anything, this tariff regime weakens our ability to respond to a Taiwan crisis. We’re not strengthening deterrence. We’re blowing up our own armory and calling it strategy.
The China Hawk case, such as it is, sounds serious because it borrows emotional weight from things that actually are serious: war, power, sovereignty. But it applies that seriousness to policies that are incoherent, ineffective, and—above all—unserious.
Forgive me but these people just fantasize about war.
Who Pays for This?
iPhones will never be made in the U.S. One serious estimate puts the cost of a domestically produced iPhone at over $3,500. At that price, no one would buy one—which means no one would make one.
Americans don’t want jobs sewing T-shirts. There are over 100,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S. right now. Despite Trump’s sepia-toned nostalgia for a past that never existed, Americans don’t want to work in factories. They don’t want their kids working in factories. And they definitely don’t want factories in their towns.
China does. Let them.
If your goal is to support domestic manufacturing, the very last thing you’d do is raise taxes on domestic consumers. But that’s exactly what tariffs are: taxes—plain and simple. They raise prices across the board, not just on imports, but ultimately on everything.
You also wouldn’t raise the cost of your own inputs—steel, aluminum, microchips. You wouldn’t close off export markets out of some fantasy about "bringing jobs back." And you wouldn’t pretend that penalizing consumers is an industrial policy.
Unless, of course, you're more interested in headlines than outcomes.
Economic War Is Still War
It’s tempting to think of sanctions and tariffs as sterile tools. Bloodless. Strategic. The kind of thing respectable people do when they want to signal toughness without firing a shot. But that’s a lie politicians tell us so they can sleep at night.
Economic war is still war. It has casualties. They just don’t show up on the front page. No flags, no funerals. Just a grandmother in Cienfuegos, combing the hills for berries, because her family—living the American Dream—can no longer help her.
The U.S. did that. Not alone, and not intentionally—but predictably. We told ourselves we were punishing the regime. We were really just virtue signaling for domestic consumption. And now we’re at it again, only this time it’s not Cuba—it’s China. A nation of 1.4 billion. A nuclear power. A commercial and industrial juggernaut.
Tariffs won’t humble Xi. Sanctions didn’t collapse Castro. Sixty years of economic warfare didn’t bring that grandmother freedom—they brought her a garden that depends on rain and a shopping list with nothing to check off. But sixty years of even modest engagement—trade, tourism, cultural exchange—might have given her both groceries and freedom. Or at least a start.
Just as an opening with China, fifty years ago, raised a billion people out of abject, crushing poverty.
Repression doesn’t thrive in the light; it thrives in isolation. And yet we keep choosing the strategy that lets dictators build walls, then pretending we’re the ones being tough.
Let people trade. Let people buy. Let grandmothers live in peace. Because when there’s nothing to buy, there’s nothing to believe in.