US even doing smash and grab of its friends: China Daily editorial

Since the United Kingdom's acrimonious divorce from the European Union, relations between the two sides have been quarrelsome at best. It can be readily appreciated therefore how grave the situation must be for them to find common cause.

What has brought the otherwise estranged and bickering divorcees together is their opposition to the United States' Inflation Reduction Act.

"The EU is very worried (about the Act) and we're working jointly with them on (a response to) it," the UK's new Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade Kemi Badenoch said at an event on Tuesday. "It's not just the EU doing stuff and we're not in the room."

French President Emmanuel Macron has called the Act "super aggressive" and "a wake-up call" for Europe, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has warned of "overbidding competition in the area of subsidies and protective tariffs" caused by the Act.

Badenoch, who said the Act "is onshoring in a way that could actually create problems with the supply chain for everybody else", also said that as well as working with the EU, the UK is "working very well with a group of like-minded countries", including India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and Switzerland, which are also "all worried" about the Act.

On Feb 1, the European Commission announced its Green Deal Industrial Plan in response to the US Act, which will provide increased state aid to help European manufacturers compete in the clean-tech sector. The EU is particularly worried about its electric vehicle industry. With $369 billion in subsidies and tax breaks up for grabs for vehicles whose final assembly is in the US and where at least half of the value of the battery components must be manufactured.

When the US began introducing its aggressive economic and trade policies some of the US' allies mistakenly believed that they would be able to share the spoils by becoming part of a US-led plunderbund. But the Inflation Reduction Act proves what developing countries have long known: The US is all take and no give, unless, as with the Inflation Reduction Act it is giving so it can snatch.

Badenoch, whose comments came just minutes after the US ambassador to the UK, offered a defense of the Act, claiming that the US "didn't do this to hurt our allies — we want to protect our allies", also said that the Act will not have the impact that the US wants it to have in countering the "economic challenge that China presents".

But don't blame the victim. Blame the mugger. It is not China that is doing a global smash and grab with beggar-all-others economic policies.

For the EU and other economies that are allies of the US, it is a case of, with friends like the US, who needs enemies.