The Trump administration’s push for closer ties with Beijing could drive a “historic understanding” between the two countries as Washington retreats from multilateral institutions and global trade frameworks. Former senior US commerce secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who served under George W. Bush, offered the assessment during a panel discussion at the Boao Forum for Asia in the southern Chinese province of Hainan on Thursday. Gutierrez said he viewed US President Donald Trump’s administration as being “very transactional [and] almost tactical”, and the White House saw the trend towards world governance as a danger. As a result, Trump has withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization and threatened to pull the country from the World Trade Organization. But what was “very positive”, Gutierrez said, was that “there appears to be a desire on the part of the Trump administration, and very specifically President Trump, to move closer to China”. “Unlike the first term when it was a tariff fight and rhetoric, I believe he’s seeing an opportunity to create a ... big agreement with China. A grand bargain. Something that puts the relationship on a new footing,” he said. “This opportunity for a historic understanding between China and the US is something that gives me optimism for this new era.” But the other panellists who were part of the discussion on US foreign policy offered a bleaker assessment of the Trump administration’s approach to issues including trade. In the two months since returning to the White House, Trump has made a series of unconventional moves that have raised global fears of a wider trade war and an American retreat from the rules-based international system. Canada, China and Mexico have been particular targets of his tariffs. And on Wednesday, the American leader unveiled a 25 per cent tariff on imported cars and light trucks starting next week to help try to revive the country’s declining manufacturing base. Cui Tiankai, China’s former ambassador to the US, said he used to be lectured on the benefits of free trade, lowering tariffs, and opening up markets but now “the same people who used to lecture us about these ideas no longer believe in them”. Asked about Trump’s trade policy, Cui said trade could not be forced, and decisions on trade would hinge on factors such as comparative advantage. “So I don’t think it’s right to say that we have taken advantage of the United States in our trade with the United States,” he said. Cui went on to say that if a country wanted to do more trade, it had to bolster its competitiveness, adding that “more tariffs is an indication of less competitiveness ... [and] a lack of confidence”. Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics at Columbia University, was blunter about Trump’s trade policy, saying it was “sheerly incompetent” and “based on many falsehoods and many basic misunderstandings”. “It is primitive,” he said, adding that tariffs would not solve the US fiscal deficit and that Trump was “economically ignorant”. While urging China to defend multilateralism, Sachs suggested that China should not count on a grand bargain with the US that depended on the US market. China, he said, had “a whole world out there where you are the most competitive country by far in what the world needs”. Asked if it was possible for China and the US to have a mutually beneficial economic relationship, Sachs said it would not be for the next few years “because the US will be too unstable”. “This is Trump’s delusion … he thinks that the threat of the US market is so overwhelming that it gives vast leverage that he can threaten everybody, that he can redraw the world geopolitical map by threatening tariffs and sanctions and so forth,” he said. “This is absurd.”