US foreign policy incoherence exposed by TikTok debacleUS foreign policy incoherence exposed by TikTok debacle

As part of our coverage of America’s haphazard system of sanctions and incentives designed to put the Chinese technological genie back in the bottle, we described a US law that banned TikTok, which half the country uses, from 19 January. That was yesterday and it duly ‘went dark’, causing significant inconvenience and, in many cases, financial losses to millions of Americans.

Say what you want about Trump, he is a skilled populist and knows an easy political win when he sees one. Having indicated he would do so, Trump used his own social media platform to make the following statement yesterday.

I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark! I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security. The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.

Americans deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations.

I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture.By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up.Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok.With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars - maybe trillions.

Therefore, my initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase we so choose.

There are so many ambiguities and unanswered questions in that statement as to make it useless in practice. While the US has largely abandoned the parliamentary law-making process in favour of presidential executive orders, it’s still not clear that he can over-ride the liability baked into the anti TikTok law. And what does he mean by “I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture”? Government ownership? Isn’t that the sort of thing we’re told to resent when China does it?

Soon after, TikTok tweeted the following statement: “In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive. It’s a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship. We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”

It's not clear how reassured those service providers are, however. The Verge reported that app stores hadn’t immediately acted on Trump’s vow and noted that His Word may not carry the legal weight he seems to think it does. TikTok does seem to be available as usual in the UK though, which is nice.

Meanwhile, a couple of Republican Senators, who are supposed to be on Trump’s side, issued the following joint statement. “We commend Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for following the law and halting operations with ByteDance and TikTok, and we encourage other companies to do the same. The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it.

“Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China. Only then will Americans be protected from the grave threat posed to their privacy and security by a communist-controlled TikTok.”

It's all a complete mess, which serves as a perfect illustration of the incoherence and futility of America’s whack-a-mole policy towards Chinese technology companies. TikTok has effectively called the bluff of the US state over this ill-conceived law and now the latter is in desperate damage limitation mode. It’s hard to imagine TikTok finding this cobbled together public private partnership opportunity any more tempting than previous demands and it must surely now feel even more emboldened to defy the US.

Meanwhile the self-harm continues to mount, with many US TikTok users now apparently fleeing to Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, otherwise known as RedNote, which hilariously gets its name from Chaiman Mao’s little red book of communist top tips. Since the corruption of America’s innocent youth is one of the stated reasons for the persecution of TikTok, RedNote will presumably be the next mole needing a whack from the US state.

The narrative we’re fed about TikTok is that, inevitably, it’s controlled by the sneaky and malevolent Chinese Communist Party, which is using it to seduce naïve Americans through home made dance videos and somehow spy on them, or something like that. Following that logic, surely all contact with anything remotely Chinese should also be banned, as well as anything that spies on US citizens, no matter where it comes from.