This is pitched as a Trump Book – and while the incompetence of Trump and his gang does play a clear and critical role in the book, there is a lot more here than cheap dunks on a clueless regime.

And having just finished Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, I found this book a rewarding deep dive on many of the events in the second half of that book.

It’s clear that China is playing by a different set of rules than the West, and whatever you think of Trump, his antics drew a lot of attention to it (whether that would have been the case under Clinton, we’ll never know).

Rogin shows clearly how national security conflicts with corporate profit interests and how this conflict affects policy decisions. A figure like Mnuchin seems much more dangerous than Trump, because he knows the damage his desired path would cause and doesn’t care. There is a section discussing the changing tactics of Chinese companies to secure American capital investment — from RTOs and IPOs to securing spots on MSCI’s indexes — that was new and interesting to me.

Other commenters have pointed out that the chapter that deals with the pandemic and post-election events feel rushed and out of place. This is where the book falls into the traps of so many Trump-era tell-alls, in that it gets into the weeds with half-truths and half-baked thinking that feels salacious but kind of petty.

Overall a readable, engaging and educational glimpse at China’s ambition and tactics. It’s worrying and important stuff.