Trump’s TikTok feud was a sign of the bigger global tech wars to come

One thing is sure, writes Hamish McRae, the battle will rage on for a generation at least and the UK may soon be caught in the middle

The US president had ordered the video app to be banned (Getty)

See it as an early skirmish in what will be a 30-year war. Donald Trump’s row with TikTok has been resolved, but the big point here is that US policy towards China has been reset.

That reset will endure whoever wins the election in November or indeed subsequent elections. The toothpaste will not go back into the tube. This is about power. For much of the past 30 years, the US broadly supported the rise of China, forming a relationship where China would sell its cheap imports to the US and in return allow American companies to gain a foothold in the country. The expression “Chimerica” was coined by academics Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick to describe this symbiotic relationship. China supported it because its exports enabled it to quadruple its GDP. The US was on side partly because cheap goods from China enabled it to increase living standards but also because of a more general feeling that China would gradually move towards a western democratic model.