“We\u2019re at economic war with China,\u201d Steve Bannon<\/a><\/strong> told The American Prospect<\/em><\/a> just days before he left the White House. The interview, which presaged his return to Breitbart, appeared to suggest the broad contours of Bannon\u2019s thesis regarding the complex power struggle currently taking place in East Asia. China, which shares a 900-mile border with North Korea, accounts for 90 percent<\/a> of the country\u2019s trade. The United States and South Korea, meanwhile, have been close allies since the Korean War. The cold war being waged across the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula remains, in may ways, a proxy between the U.S. and the People\u2019s Republic, which have long been engaged in skirmishes over I.P. theft, price undercutting, and job exportation. \u201cOne of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it\u2019s gonna be them if we go down this path,\u201d Bannon opined to Robert Kuttner,<\/strong> who days before had compared his boss, Donald Trump<\/a>,<\/strong> to the \u201carrogant fool\u201d Kim Jong Un.<\/strong> \u201cOn Korea, they\u2019re just tapping us along. It\u2019s just a sideshow.\u201d<\/p>\n Donald Trump<\/strong> entered the White House prepared to hold China accountable for what he saw as currency manipulation, among other economic maneuvers. But Trump hasn\u2019t quite stood by his harsh rhetoric. But Bannon, who is now comfortably outside the confines of the West Wing, appears prepared to turn his anti-China war into reality, enlisting allies from Henry Kissinger<\/strong> to Hong Kong investment banks in his fight against Chinese trade practices. In an interview with Bloomberg\u2019s Joshua Green<\/strong><\/a>, author of the recent magnum opus Devil\u2019s Bargain,<\/em> Bannon agreed with the common perception that China\u2019s frequent intellectual-property theft was crippling the U.S. economy. This being Bannon, of course, he saw the dynamic through the prism of highly selective, slightly apocryphal events from ancient history. \u201cThere have been 4,000 years of Chinese diplomatic history, all centered on \u2018barbarian management,\u2019 minus the last 150 years,\u201d he told Green. \u201cIt\u2019s always about making the barbarians a tributary state . . . Our tribute to China is our technology\u2014that\u2019s what it takes to enter their market, and [they\u2019ve taken] $3.5 trillion worth over the last 10 years. We have to give them the basic essence of American capitalism: our innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s one thing for Bannon to talk up a trade war with China, but it\u2019s another for him to be actively agitating for one. Earlier this month, Bannon spoke at a conference in Hong Kong, sponsored by a Chinese bank, in which he called the former British colony \u201cthe heart of the economic-nationalist movement [that] is standing up to China.\u201d He also took several meetings with Cold War-era figures, including Kissinger, the Nixon-era secretary of state who opened the door to trade with China and has been enjoying lucrative consulting fees pretty much ever since, in which the two discussed the Committee on the Present Danger, a hawkish foreign-policy interest group. \u201cThey understood that you couldn\u2019t do it from inside,\u201d Bannon says. \u201cYou had to go outside and, like a fire bell in the night, wake up the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n