Waiting for Godot in the global economy: Why the US trade war strategy misses the point

Editor's note: Warwick Powell is an Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology and a Senior Fellow at Taihe Institute, Beijing. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a parable of paralysis. It's a theatre of hope and futility where two men, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly for Godot. Godot never arrives. While they wait, they chatter aimlessly with each other. In the tragicomedy of modern geopolitics, the US trade war with China mirrors this absurdist ritual. The protagonists, in this case, Washington and Wall Street, are talking to each other, waiting anxiously for a resolution, a signal, a concession, or a climactic end. China, the stand-in for Godot, remains distant, inscrutable, and silent.

But unlike Beckett's play, where the lack of resolution is existential, the deadlock in US-China trade relations is the performative consequence of a misdiagnosis. The United States' economic confrontation with China is not merely about tariffs or deficits. Rather, it is driven by a politics of grievance rooted in outdated national accounting logic and a refusal to confront the structural features of the global economy the US itself helped build.

For the US, its trade deficit becomes a secular sin, and China the transgressor. This framing legitimizes retaliation under the guise of redress. Yet, it is analytically flawed. The US dollar's role as the global reserve currency guarantees persistent deficits; offshoring reflects corporate strategies of capital accumulation, not foreign malfeasance; and intellectual property conflicts mask the deeper issue of who sets the terms of technological development in a multipolar world.

Since the Trump administration launched its first trade war in 2018, and with continued strategic decoupling under Biden, US policy has been animated by the belief that China's rise is an economic aberration, a deviation from the rules of the liberal order, and something which must be exposed and curtailed. In this telling, China manipulates its currency, steals intellectual property, subsidizes its companies, engages in assorted "unfair" trade practices and exploits the international system. These grievances, often measured through national accounts-based imbalances - trade deficits and capital imbalances - form the justification for retaliatory action.

But this accounting framework is misleading. The US trade deficit is not primarily the result of Chinese policy; it is a structural feature of a dollar-centric global financial system and a domestic political economy that privileged finance capital over industrial capital for decades. As the issuer of the world's reserve currency, the United States imports products and exports dollars. Trade deficits, in this context, are a function of America's capacity to issue dollars and of a world in which these are accepted as IOUs in exchange for goods. America's trade deficits are not the moral failings of trading partners. Multinational corporations, including American ones, offshored manufacturing not under duress but in pursuit of efficiency, scale, and profit.

The deeper irony is that these imbalances were sustained, indeed structurally and institutionally incentivized, by the very neoliberal global order the US championed. Global supply chains, intellectual property regimes, and WTO accession were not imposed on the US; they were orchestrated by it. Now, faced with the reality that China has used these tools to accelerate its own development, Washington has turned to a theatre of retribution rather than reflection.

This theatre, of escalating tariffs, executive orders and tech bans, is not without consequence. It spooks markets, fractures supply chains and escalates tensions. But its underlying structure is performative. Like Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett's play, the US government and financial elites remain locked in a dialogue about what to do while waiting. Markets react to policy signals, politicians respond to market sentiment, and all the while the specter of China looms large, as both antagonist and hoped-for savior.

China is expected to "turn up"; to give in, recalibrate, liberalize, or somehow legitimize US economic dominance. Each new round of tariffs or restrictions is justified by the hope that it will trigger this change. But this hope is misplaced.

China, in this analogy, is Godot. And Godot will not come; not because China is defiant, but because the premise of the waiting is flawed. China is not waiting to be reintegrated into an American-led system. Together with others in the global majority, it is building something different.

For over a decade, China has embarked on a long-term strategy of technological self-reliance and state-activated modernization. This strategy is not cyclical but civilizational in orientation. From the Made in China 2025 initiative to the "dual circulation" strategy, China is preparing for a world where dependency on Western markets and technology is minimized. Its investments in semiconductors, AI, renewable energy, and digital infrastructure are not designed to win a temporary reprieve from US sanctions. Rather, they are designed to make China structurally independent from Western constraints.

Moreover, China's economic diplomacy, through the Belt and Road Initiative, RCEP, and its engagement with the Global South, signals a pivot away from seeking approval in Western-led institutions. It is not that China won't engage, but that it no longer sees its economic - or indeed, its civilizational - legitimacy as contingent on US acceptance.

The problem, then, is not simply that the US is waiting; it is that it is waiting for the wrong thing, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons. To wait for Godot is to wait for something within a framework that renders his arrival impossible. The performative theatre of trade war is, therefore, a politics of misrecognition of both the nature of the global economy and of China's strategic posture. The more the US waits, the more absurd the performance becomes, until eventually the waiting itself is revealed not as strategy, but as disorientation in search of an object that will never arrive.

The politics of grievance that underpin the trade war obscure more pressing questions: What is the future of global economic governance in a multipolar world? How should the US reconfigure its economic strategy to reflect the realities of distributed technological capacity and contested global value chains?

Rather than treating China's rise as a betrayal of a liberal order, it may be more productive to recognize that the order itself has evolved. China's development model is not an anomaly. On the contrary, it is a response to the very conditions globalization produced. Instead of punishing that model, the US must ask whether its own economic assumptions remain fit for purpose. This means shifting from a reactive stance to a constructive strategy. It means prioritizing investing in domestic innovation ecosystems, rebuilding manufacturing capabilities, reforming the education and labor market institutions that underpin competitiveness, and reimagining multilateralism not as a tool of dominance but as a forum for coordination in an increasingly complex world.

In Beckett's play, the final act mirrors the first. Nothing has changed. Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting. So too, if current dynamics persist, will the United States be locked in a cycle of waiting, expecting China to arrive on terms that are no longer relevant. The longer it waits, the more absurd the performance becomes. At some point, the rational choice is not to double down on grievance but to exit the stage entirely and begin anew. The task is not to compel Godot to appear. It is to realize he was never coming in the first place.

The world has changed.