Don’t Trade Away America for Some Soybeans
Don’t Trade Away America for Some Soybeans
Beijing is playing the long game. Washington needs to do the same.
The cliché holds that China plans in decades while America plans in election cycles.
Increasingly, though, our thinking seems to stop even sooner—around the length of a crop cycle.
Not as an agricultural policy, but as a governing instinct.
Soybeans are a solid proxy for how the United States deals with China: small, transactional, immediately legible “wins” pitched as strategic breakthroughs. A shipment resumes, a statistic ticks up, a headline declares progress. Meanwhile, Beijing quietly continues accumulating long-term advantages.
Take the most recent “win.”
China “resumes” U.S. soybean purchases and the headlines dutifully follow. But the underlying data tells a different story. Even after this supposed thaw, U.S. soybean exports to China remain down roughly 99 percent from historical levels. Despite all the hype, China is on track to register its lowest share of U.S. soybean exports since 2002.
The soybean theory rests on a simple insight: America evaluates success through events, while China evaluates success through positioning. We ask whether something happened. They ask whether something became permanent.
China doesn’t need to win negotiations. It shapes the environment in which negotiations occur. That means controlling inputs, bottlenecks, and systems that persist regardless of who occupies office in Washington.
This pattern is not new. It is how U.S.–China diplomacy has operated for decades.
Consider the Phase One trade deal from 2020. It was heralded as a turning point and proof that tough negotiation had forced Beijing to change course. China pledged to purchase an additional $200 billion in U.S. goods and services. The enforcement mechanism, however, relied largely on consultations and discretionary “snapback” tariffs.
In practice, China never came close to meeting its commitments. Independent tracking found Beijing fulfilled only about 58–60 percent of its promised purchases across 2020 and 2021. There were no meaningful penalties. The deal expired. The headlines moved on. China’s industrial assault on America continued.
The soybean theory played out perfectly: a visible agreement, a short-term sense of resolution, and no lasting shift in position.
Go back further and the pattern scales up.
When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the argument in Washington was that integration would produce convergence toward liberalization and rules-based behavior. Instead, China used WTO access to accelerate a state-led, mercantilist model while exploiting weak enforcement mechanisms and asymmetric compliance.
Even U.S. trade officials now acknowledge that China retained extensive state control, subsidized national champions, and evaded meaningful discipline while benefiting from open Western markets. The United States gained cheaper consumer goods. China gained industrial dominance.
Once again, America focused on the transaction, while China focused on the system.
Chinese leaders have repeatedly framed competition with the United States as a long historical process in which “time and momentum” favor China. Short-term economic pain is acceptable if it advances long-term positioning. Small concessions are trivial if they buy strategic breathing room.
That is why soybeans are such effective currency.
They are economically marginal to China’s long-term objectives. Beijing can source them elsewhere tomorrow. That makes them a perfect symbolic gesture to absorb attention while larger, irreversible gains continue elsewhere.
The same logic governs rare earths.
China has secured dominance across the entire supply chain, not just one link. Today, it accounts for roughly 60 to 70 percent of global rare-earth mining and more than 85 to 90 percent of global processing and refining capacity, giving Beijing leverage at both the extraction and transformation stages. That control is not abstract. China has repeatedly shown a willingness to weaponize access through export restrictions, licensing requirements, and informal slowdowns to extract political and economic concessions.
That leverage has already surfaced in recent talks, where Beijing has quietly floated rare-earth export controls—including what Chinese officials themselves have described as a “nuclear option”—as a reminder that negotiations do not take place on neutral terrain.
The Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global investment strategy, follows the same logic.
It is about geopolitical positioning, not development. Ports, railways, power grids, and debt structures do not disappear when administrations change or trade agreements expire. While America negotiates deals and pushes unpopular cultural programs, China accumulates leverage.
And through all of this, Washington keeps falling for the soybeans. Still.
Empires do not collapse because they fail to negotiate. They collapse because they lose the ability to distinguish between tactics and strategy, symbols and structure.
Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned.
America celebrates soybeans while the architecture of the world is quietly being rearranged.
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