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President Donald Trump returned from his high-stakes meeting with Xi Jinping in Busan with a win for American lives and American leverage — a negotiated reduction in the punitive tariff regime that had reached an unsustainable high. The agreement reportedly trims overall tariffs on Chinese goods from 57 percent to 47 percent while specifically lowering the fentanyl-related tariff to about 10 percent, a move Trump framed as part of a broader push to force Beijing’s hand on the deadly flow of synthetic opioids into our communities.
Make no mistake: this was not a naive capitulation, it was hard-nosed statecraft. Beijing reportedly agreed to resume large purchases of U.S. soybeans and to ease rare-earth export restrictions for a period, while signaling cooperation on stopping the chemicals that are killing Americans in record numbers — a tangible return for American pressure. The substance of the deal shows that tariffs, when wielded by a president who actually means it, can compel real commitments from a regime that long treated U.S. complaints as background noise.
President Trump left no ambiguity about his posture after the meeting, calling the talks a huge success and exuding confidence that America regained bargaining power across the Pacific. This administration’s willingness to use tariffs as a bargaining chip has jolted decades of complacency in our China policy, and it’s the kind of muscle that gets results for farmers, manufacturers, and grieving families in Main Street America. Critics on the left will howl that tariffs are “concessions”; the rest of us see leverage finally used to save lives and protect livelihoods.
The human cost that drove this fight is painfully real. Former deputy national security advisor Steve Yates — a conservative who has worked on China policy for years — publicly praised the president’s fentanyl tariffs after losing his own daughter to the drug, urging the nation to treat fentanyl precursors with the severity they deserve and to bring every tool of government to bear on the traffickers and their enablers. His testimony is a sober reminder that this is not abstract geopolitics, it is personal tragedy turned into policy urgency by Americans who demand action.
There are sober caveats: experts warn that a one-off agreement does not erase enforcement gaps and that law enforcement cooperation and real supply-chain choke points must be monitored to make these promises stick. Trump’s deal is a strong opening move, but conservatives must insist that the administration follows through with inspections, prosecutions, and targeted penalties so that Beijing’s commitments are more than words on Air Force One. If Washington combines pressure with relentless follow-up, we can choke off the precursors and save American lives without surrendering strategic advantage.
For patriotic, hardworking Americans, this moment is a validation of a clearer, tougher foreign policy — one that refuses business as usual with a hostile power and places American lives above abstract trade orthodoxies. Congress should back the president where he is right, fund the interdiction and treatment programs that protect communities, and hold China accountable if it fails to deliver. We did not achieve this by appeasement; we achieved it by insisting that America’s safety and dignity come first, and we should stay on that course until the fentanyl pipeline is shut down for good.
