The view of the Port of Seattle is bleak this morning as the port, usually jammed with lots of container ships and the container yard filled, is absolutely empty and no Chinese ships are enroute. Trade with China, at this main West Coast port at least, has totally stopped. It’s at Zero.
USA media, the MSM, is hiding what’s going on in China for some reason, which is all the protests and riots. The people are upset with the government, they look at the trade war and see clearly that it means starvation for the common people, not the fat, rich people in power.
Google blocked me from accessing the current status of shipping in the Port of Los Angeles, our nation’s largest shipping port, but I was able to get onto the Earth Cam site for the port, using DuckDuckGo and the port is absolutely EMPTY. Just as the Port of Seattle is. Click on the Earth Cam link and check it out.
America can survive a long time without any Chinese imports because we don’t import but a tiny amount of food from them. Our largest food importer is Mexico. Plus we don’t have 1.4 billion people wanting to eat who have to import vast amounts of food and pay for it with their exports, which are no longer being exported.
The last time the international supply system was even partially blocked, it took several months to begin to get it functioning semi-normally again, if you recall the ship that blocked the Suez Canal and the Covid shutdown on top of it. This time, while commerce between China and the rest of the world continues, it’s at a total standstill between them and us and the USA is China’s single largest trade partner.
China will run out of money to buy food for all the people and when they do, the people may rise up against the government. Whether the military will shoot them down or support them, I’ve no guess, but either way, a lot of Chinese are going to die if this doesn’t end very soon, and China’s Long March toward world domination is headed for a cliff.
Much is going to hit the fan if the trade war isn’t quickly resolved. We may have riots here over shortages of various goods but one thing we won’t riot over is hunger. While we don’t produce as much food as we used to, the USA is still the breadbasket of the world, we export 20% of what we grow. Now we’re not sending any of it to China, and now they have much less money to buy what they need anyway.
This is going to get serious in a hurry. I can see us being under Martial Law to quell riots, China threatening nuclear war, everyone waving their bombs and guns around, but it all ends very quietly if China will simply rescind their obscene tariffs against us and stop a few other practices, like cheating on their money value, violating other nations sovereignty, smuggling in Fentanyl to us, stealing our technology and so on, and start acting like global partners instead of mortal enemies.
Since I don’t see that ever happening though, we may see some battles at sea and worse before reason finally prevails.