criterion essay

Extended Essay - Criteria: Criterion C: Critical Thinking

• Criterion A: Focus and Method
• Criterion B: Knowledge and Understanding
• Criterion C: Critical Thinking
• Table of Contents
• Citations and Referencing
• Appendices (Optional)
• Initial reflection
• Interim reflection

Criterion C: Points to Consider

• Main body and conclusion
• Discussion and evaluation

Criterion C: The Strands

Main Body and Conclusion

Because critically evaluating evidence in order to produce a reasoned argument and sound conclusion is the key focus of any research paper, Criterion C has the most marks allocated to it.

There are three key strands that you should address in Criterion C:

All research materials must be relevant to answering the research question.

The research findings must be effectively analyzed in order to produce a reasoned argument. 

The analyses must be supported by relevant evidence.

Discussion and Evaluation

You must develop a coherent and well-reasoned argument that is supported by the evidence presented. 

You should provide a critical evaluation of source material.

YOUR CONCLUSION MUST ANSWER THE RESEARCH QUESTION!

The conclusion should reiterate your key findings and main points developed in the body of the essay and provide a resolution to your research question.

Recommended word count for the conclusion: 350-450 words.

When writing your conclusion, you should:

• Respond to the actual research question as stated on your title page.
• Comment on any inconclusive findings or multiple interpretations if that is what your research has indicated.
• Disprove your thesis if your evidence has lead you to this conclusion.
• Offer an evaluation of the value and limitations of the methodology or sources you have used.
• Mention any unresolved or additional questions that have arisen as a result of your research and explain why answering those questions goes beyond the scope of your current work.
• Summarize the key points raised in the main body and synthesize them into a final analysis.

AVOID: 

• Introducing new material.
• Offering no conclusion at all.
• Including any personal statements.
• Including any accusations.
• Answering a question that is different from the one on your title page.
• << Previous: Criterion B: Knowledge and Understanding
• Next: Criterion D: Presentation >>
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1.3: Five Evaluation Criteria

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• Chris Manning, Sally Pierce, & Melissa Lucken
• Lansing Community College

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There are five criteria we can use to evaluate any piece of writing. These criteria are Focus, Development, Organization, Style, and Conventions.

Focus . What are you writing about? What claim or thesis are you defending? This criterion is the broadest, concerned with the context, purpose, and coherence of a piece of writing. Is your topic appropriate for an assignment? Do you stay on that topic or drift off on unhelpful tangents? Have you focused too minutely or too widely? For instance, an essay about the American Civil War in general is probably too broad for most college essays. You might be better off writing about a particular battle, general, or incident.

Development . Development is concerned with details and evidence. Do you provide enough supporting material to satisfy the expectations of your readers? A proper research paper, for instance, usually includes many references and quotations to many other relevant works of scholarship. A description of a painting would probably include details about its appearance, composition, and maybe even biographical information about the artist who painted it. Deciding what details to include depends on the intended audience of a piece. An article about cancer intended for young children would look quite different than one written for senior citizens.

Organization . Organization, often called “arrangement,” concerns the order and layout of a paper. Traditionally, a paper is divided into an introduction, body, and conclusion. Paragraphs are focused on a single main idea or topic (unity), and transitions between sentences and paragraphs are smooth and logical. A poorly organized paper rambles, drifting among unrelated topics in a haphazard and confusing fashion.

Style . Style is traditionally concerned with clarity, elegance, and precision. An effective stylist is not only able to write clearly for an audience, but can also please them with evocative language, metaphors, rhythm, or figures of speech. Effective stylists take pains not just to make a point, but to make it well.

Conventions . This criterion covers grammar, mechanics, punctuation, formatting, and other issues that are dictated by convention or rules. Although many students struggle with conventions, the knowledge of where to place a comma in a sentence is usually not as important as whether that sentence was worth writing in the first place. Nevertheless, excessive errors can make even a brilliant writer seem careless or ignorant, qualities that will seldom impress one’s readers.

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The Academy Award–winning film from cinematic dream-weaver Guillermo del Toro, directing alongside Mark Gustafson, that reinvents the classic fable through breathtaking, boundary-pushing stop-motion animation

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• 4K digital master, supervised by directors Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
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The monsters that made me: Growing up disabled, all of my heroes were villains

Horror movies challenged my relationship with myself

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Every monster needs an origin story. Here’s mine.

I was born with a rare condition — radioulnar synostosis — which restricts the movement of my forearms. I am unable to turn my hands over palms up, the way you might accept loose change or splash water on your face or land an uppercut. I have lived with this condition all my life, and yet it wasn’t until my late 20s that I started referring to myself as “disabled.”

This word carries immense baggage, and many of us within the wide spectrum of disability tend to minimize our experiences or, as in my case, suffer from feelings of impostor syndrome. Could be worse , I often tell myself. You don’t deserve to call yourself disabled .

Coming to terms with my disability took a long time, to not only accept my identity, but also to discard the lingering shame and stigma that coincide with being disabled. A major part of this reconciliation was thanks to an unlikely source of solace — horror films.

I’ve been a horror obsessive as long as I can remember, but I only recently figured out how to articulate why the genre resonates so strongly with me. On-screen depictions of deformed, disfigured killers and creatures serve as reflections of my own otherness. The phantasmagoric realm of horror, though dark and violent, provides an outlet for me to express the discomfort, frustration, and anxiety surrounding my corporeal limitations.

From a young age, I subconsciously related to monsters, madmen, and every combination thereof. Many even taught me to frame disability in a positive fashion. The archetypal antagonists from the golden age of horror cinema — the Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster — all underwent a transformation to be imbued with extraordinary, otherworldly gifts. Their differences were a source of power, inverting the traditional view of disability as a hindrance, a burden.

My attraction to horror began innocently enough. There were clamshell VHSes galore at my babysitter’s house, including all the Disney classics, many of which were plenty horrific, like the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia . I carefully studied the imposing figure of Chernabog, the winged, devil-horned demon summoning lost souls from the underworld. To me, he seemed benevolent rather than evil, a counterpoint to the sparkling sunrise that banishes him back to the shadows, an essential element of natural balance.

Disney’s version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” oddly lumped as a double feature with The Wind in the Willows , presented another kindred spirit — the Headless Horseman. Decked in black and adorned with a blood-red cape, clutching a saber in one hand and a flaming jack-o’-lantern in the other, the Headless Horseman, for me, came to represent the extreme limits of human endurance. A cannonball takes the ill-fated soldier’s head and still his body lingers, perseveres.

Another seminal gateway wasn’t even a horror film. On its surface, The Wizard of Oz is a saccharine Technicolor musical romp, but the dream world its characters inhabit is full of menace — maniacal flying monkeys, spear-wielding Winkie guards, and my favorite, the iconic Wicked Witch of the West. Despite her green flesh and pointy chin, I found her beautiful, alluring, and endlessly more compelling than the picture-perfect Glinda. Astride her broomstick, flinging fireballs, stalking Dorothy and her companions through Oz, the Wicked Witch became the reason I watched an old tape of The Wizard of Oz so many times that the reel snapped.

As she pointed toward the camera with her spindly fingers and sharp nails, I imagined the Wicked Witch was singling me out, inviting me into her world. There, everyone was different, from the Munchkins, notably played by a cast of dwarf actors, to the main trio of the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, who were all “defective” in their own ways, physically and mentally handicapped by the absence of some critical inner faculty. Why Dorothy was so desperate to return to the bleak, monochromatic reality of Depression-era Kansas was beyond me. I would have much preferred to stay in Oz.

By the time I finished elementary school, my tastes sharpened, and I craved harder, more acidic fare. My appetite had been steadily whet by a diet of gory comic books and yellowed Stephen King paperbacks. Cable television in the ’90s was also rife with kindertrauma-inducing spectacle. I was allowed to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Goosebumps , since both were on kid-friendly channels. When left unsupervised, which was often as the child of a single mom who had to work multiple gigs, I could sneak episodes of Tales from the Crypt or X-Files . I knew there was a world of adult horror, and I wanted nothing more than to breach this forbidden zone.

Where to watch the movies mentioned in this piece

• Fantasia : Disney Plus
• Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow : Disney Plus , as a part of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad 
• The Wizard of Oz : Max
• The Evil Dead : For digital rental or purchase on Amazon and Vudu
• The Brood : Max , Criterion Channel
• Castle Freak : Shudder, AMC Plus, and for free with ads on Tubi

I caught glimpses of it at the video rental store, where I was compulsively drawn to the horror section. I scanned the shelves, memorizing titles for future reference, studying the macabre cover art, scrutinizing the stills of sliced throats, hacked limbs, and oozing ectoplasm. Although I wasn’t allowed to take home anything rated R, I soon found loopholes that granted me access to films I was desperate to ingest.

Staying over at a friend’s house, we would wait until the grown-ups were asleep, then flip to HBO (a luxury we could not afford at my own home). It was there I first watched The Evil Dead , a personal landmark of my initiation into splatter flicks. My friend and I insisted we weren’t scared, as we cowered in our sleeping bags, squealing with perverse delight when the first possessed teenager stabbed her friend in the ankle with a pencil. We chattered throughout the movie to compensate for our obvious nerves, but by the time Ash Williams descended into the cellar searching for shotgun shells with a ravenous Deadite on the loose, the two of us had gone mute with fear.

Ash, armed with his trademark chainsaw, was clearly the hero (and himself destined to become an amputee in the sequel), but it was the Deadites who entranced me. When the demons seized control, the bodily degradation took effect. First, the teenagers’ eyes went white, and before long, their flesh wrinkled, turned sallow, decayed, bile and pus dripping from spontaneous lacerations. I had never witnessed anything so utterly bloodsoaked, resplendent in viscera, a film that relished in the ways a body can be corrupted.

Bodies are frightfully fragile, and we are all one small step away from an accident or illness that can permanently debilitate. Few filmmakers understand the body’s capacity for biological horror more than David Cronenberg , whose oeuvre introduced me to a world where disability is infused with latent eroticism and regenerative potential.

In high school, I got a job at the same video rental store I prowled as a kid. Now I had the freedom to take home whatever I pleased. The older guys who managed the shop would recommend titles to test my limits — Salò , Cannibal Holocaust , Irreversible . Cocksure teenager that I was, enduring “the most fucked up movie ever made” became my solemn quest. But disturbing or violent as they may be, few video nasties were capable of truly scaring me. Knowing I was a devotee of both horror and sci-fi, one of the clerks suggested I check out Cronenberg, so I took a chance on The Brood .

I was deeply unsettled by the story of an estranged couple fighting over custody of their daughter. What frighted me wasn’t the deformed, dwarflike progeny — birthed by the ex-wife and telekinetically driven to brutally murder anyone who crossed her. The broodlings were devoted to their mother, as was I, and would do anything to protect her. What shook me was Cronenberg’s metaphorical treatment of divorce, especially after watching my own parents’ messy split. The rupturing of a family resulting in physiological consequences illustrated the link between body and mind, a relationship of which I was all too aware, having dealt with depression as long as I could remember.

For many people with disabilities, physical and mental anguish are synonymous, feeding into one another. Feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and alienation frequently accompany disability. More often than not, disability is chronic, permanent, and insoluble. It can be mitigated, people can adapt, but full-blown cures are elusive. My disability is one such case. I may have accepted this reality, come to terms with my fate, but the journey has not been without frustration, anger, and despair — the monster’s currency.

This explains in part why monsters act as they do. Pain begets pain. Violence begets violence. Fear begets fear. As such, the monster embodies the way we perpetuate trauma, wherein the victim becomes the aggressor. This is why we sympathize with Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolfman, because we understand that they were not born to be monsters — they were made that way by forces beyond their control.

Which is precisely why I cannot totally fault my all-time favorite Lovecraftian abomination, the titular Castle Freak from Stuart Gordon’s low-budget opus, another film I chanced upon at the video rental store. The freak is imprisoned from childhood by his deranged mother, routinely tortured until his face and body are a tapestry of grotesque wounds and scars. He escapes the confines of his dungeon and spies on the American family who has moved into his home, taking a special liking to the couple’s blind daughter.

While the freak wastes no time eviscerating unlucky victims, the lecherous, alcoholic father, played by the incomparable Jeffrey Combs, is no less redeemable. The freak’s feral nature is the byproduct of a lifetime’s abuse. The father, by contrast, has no excuse. Watching this film for the first time, I empathized with the freak and thought of my innate freakishness and the times I’ve lashed out or been cruel. What was my excuse?

Even as the maimed, distorted bodies of creatures like the Castle Freak or the Brood or the Deadites or the Wicked Witch mirrored real-world disabilities and offered me an escape, a safe environment where it was appropriate to root for the villain, I realized that I didn’t want to hurt people, to injure others as I’d been, whether physically or mentally. And more than anything, I was determined not to use my disability as a scapegoat, to behave like a monster and blame it on the way I was born.

Strange as it sounds, I learned to take ownership of my mistakes and embrace my faults through horror films, to forgo hiding behind a mask like the boogeymen in slasher movies. Horror demands that we not avert our gaze from “abnormal” bodies. It challenges our prejudices, our preconceptions. These are films that celebrate disfigurement and deformity instead of shunning it. I reject the notion that horror merely co-opts disability as a cheap scare tactic. When I watch a scary movie, I do not see exploitation — I see exaltation, the disabled not as demonic but as divine.

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How Biden Adopted Trump’s Trade War With China

The president has proposed new barriers to electric vehicles, steel and other goods..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Donald Trump upended decades of American policy when he started a trade war with China. Many thought that President Biden would reverse those policies. Instead, he’s stepping them up. Today, my colleague, Jim Tankersley, explains.

It’s Monday, May 13.

Jim, it’s very nice to have you in the studio.

It’s so great to be here, Sabrina. Thank you so much.

So we are going to talk today about something I find very interesting and I know you’ve been following. We’re in the middle of a presidential campaign. You are an economics reporter looking at these two candidates, and you’ve been trying to understand how Trump and Biden are thinking about our number one economic rival, and that is China.

As we know, Trump has been very loud and very clear about his views on China. What about Biden?

Well, no one is going to accuse President Biden of being as loud as former President Trump. But I think he’s actually been fairly clear in a way that might surprise a lot of people about how he sees economic competition with China.

We’re going after China in the wrong way. China is stealing intellectual property. China is conditioning —

And Biden has, kind of surprisingly, sounded a lot, in his own Joe Biden way, like Trump.

They’re not competing. They’re cheating. They’re cheating. And we’ve seen the damage here in America.

He has been very clear that he thinks China is cheating in trade.

The bottom line is I want fair competition with China, not conflict. And we’re in a stronger position to win the economic competition of the 21st century against China or anyone else because we’re investing in America and American workers again. Finally.

And maybe the most surprising thing from a policy perspective is just how much Biden has built on top of the anti-China moves that Trump made and really is the verge of his own sort of trade war with China.

Interesting. So remind us, Jim, what did Trump do when he actually came into office? We, of course, remember Trump really talking about China and banging that drum hard during the campaign, but remind us what he actually did when he came into office.

Yeah, it’s really instructive to start with the campaign, because Trump is talking about China in some very specific ways.

We have a $500 billion deficit, trade deficit, with China. We’re going to turn it around. And we have the cards. Don’t forget —

They’re ripping us off. They’re stealing our jobs.

They’re using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China, and many other countries are doing the same thing. So we’re losing our good jobs, so many.

The economic context here is the United States has lost a couple of million jobs in what was called the China shock of the early 2000s. And Trump is tapping into that.

But when the Chinese come in, and they want to make great trade deals — and they make the best trade deals, and not anymore. When I’m there, we turn it around, folks. We turn it around. We have —

And what he’s promising as president is that he’s going to bring those jobs back.

I’ll be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. I’ll take them back from China, from Japan.

And not just any jobs, good-paying manufacturing jobs, all of it — clothes, shoes, steel, all of these jobs that have been lost that American workers, particularly in the industrial Midwest, used to do. Trump’s going to bring them back with policy meant to rebalance the trade relationship with China to get a better deal with China.

So he’s saying China is eating our lunch and has been for decades. That’s the reason why factory workers in rural North Carolina don’t have work. It’s those guys. And I’m going to change that.

Right. And he likes to say it’s because our leaders didn’t cut the right deal with them, so I’m going to make a better deal. And to get a better deal, you need leverage. So a year into his presidency, he starts taking steps to amass leverage with China.

And so what does that look like?

Just an hour ago, surrounded by a hand-picked group of steelworkers, President Trump revealed he was not bluffing.

It starts with tariffs. Tariffs are taxes that the government imposes on imports.

Two key global imports into America now face a major new barrier.

Today, I’m defending America’s national security by placing tariffs on foreign imports of steel and aluminum.

And in this case, it’s imports from a lot of different countries, but particularly China.

Let’s take it straight to the White House. The president of the United States announcing new trade tariffs against China. Let’s listen in.

This has been long in the making. You’ve heard —

So Trump starts, in 2018, this series of tariffs that he’s imposing on all sorts of things — washing machines, solar panels, steel, aluminum. I went to Delaware to a lighting store at that time, I remember, where basically everything they sold came from China and was subject to the Trump tariffs, because that’s where lighting was made now.

Interesting.

Hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods now start falling under these Trump tariffs. The Chinese, of course, don’t take this lying down.

China says it is not afraid of a trade war with the US, and it’s fighting back against President Trump with its own tariffs on US goods.

They do their own retaliatory tariffs. Now American exports to China cost more for Chinese consumers. And boom, all of a sudden, we are in the midst of a full-blown trade war between the United States and Beijing.

Right. And that trade war was kind of a shock because for decades, politicians had avoided that kind of policy. It was the consensus of the political class in the United States that there should not be tariffs like that. It should be free trade. And Trump just came in and blew up the consensus.

Yeah. And Sabrina, I may have mentioned this once or 700 times before on this program, but I talk to a lot of economists in my job.

Yeah, it’s weird. I talk to a lot of economists. And in 2018 when this started, there were very, very, very few economists of any political persuasion who thought that imposing all these tariffs were a good idea. Republican economists in particular, this is antithetical to how they think about the world, which is low taxes, free trade. And even Democratic economists who thought they had some problems with the way free trade had been conducted did not think that Trump’s “I’m going to get a better deal” approach was going to work. And so there was a lot of criticism at the time, and a lot of politicians really didn’t like it, a lot of Democrats, many Republicans. And it all added up to just a real, whoa, I don’t think this is going to work.

So that begs the question, did it?

Well, it depends on what you mean by work. Economically, it does not appear to have achieved what Trump wanted. There’s no evidence yet in the best economic research that’s been done on this that enormous amounts of manufacturing jobs came back to the United States because of Trump’s tariffs. There was research, for example, on the tariffs on washing machines. They appear to have helped a couple thousand jobs, manufacturing jobs be created in the United States, but they also raised the price of washing machines for everybody who bought them by enough that each additional job that was created by those tariffs effectively cost consumers, like, $800,000 per job.

There’s like lots of evidence that the sectors Trump was targeting to try to help here, he didn’t. There just wasn’t a lot of employment rebound to the United States. But politically, it really worked. The tariffs were very popular. They had this effect of showing voters in those hollowed-out manufacturing areas that Trump was on their team and that he was fighting for them. Even if they didn’t see the jobs coming back, they felt like he was standing up for them.

So the research suggests this was a savvy political move by Trump. And in the process, it sort of changes the political economic landscape in both parties in the United States.

Right. So Trump made these policies that seemed, for many, many years in the American political system, fringe, isolationist, economically bad, suddenly quite palatable and even desirable to mainstream policymakers.

Yeah. Suddenly getting tough on China is something everyone wants to do across both parties. And so from a political messaging standpoint, being tough on China is now where the mainstream is. But at the same time, there is still big disagreement over whether Trump is getting tough on China in the right way, whether he’s actually being effective at changing the trade relationship with China.

Remember that Trump was imposing these tariffs as a way to get leverage for a better deal with China. Well, he gets a deal of sorts, actually, with the Chinese government, which includes some things about tariffs, and also China agreeing to buy some products from the United States. Trump spins it as this huge win, but nobody else really, including Republicans, acts like Trump has solved the problem that Trump himself has identified. This deal is not enough to make everybody go, well, everything’s great with China now. We can move on to the next thing.

China remains this huge issue. And the question of what is the most effective way to deal with them is still an animating force in politics.

Got it. So politically, huge win, but policy-wise and economically, and fundamentally, the problem of China still very much unresolved.

Absolutely.

So then Biden comes in. What does Biden do? Does he keep the tariffs on?

Biden comes to office, and there remains this real pressure from economists to roll back what they consider to be the ineffective parts of Trump’s trade policy. That includes many of the tariffs. And it’s especially true at a time when almost immediately after Biden takes office, inflation spikes. And so Americans are paying a lot of money for products, and there’s this pressure on Biden, including from inside his administration, to roll back some of the China tariffs to give Americans some relief on prices.

And Biden considers this, but he doesn’t do it. He doesn’t reverse Trump’s tariff policy. In the end, he’s actually building on it.

We’ll be right back.

So Jim, you said that Biden is actually building on Trump’s anti-China policy. What exactly does that look like?

So Biden builds on the Trump China policy in three key ways, but he does it with a really specific goal that I just want you to keep in mind as we talk about all of this, which is that Biden isn’t just trying to beat China on everything. He’s not trying to cut a better deal. Biden is trying to beat China in a specific race to own the clean-energy future.

Clean energy.

Yeah. So keep that in mind, clean energy. And the animating force behind all of the things Biden does with China is that Biden wants to beat China on what he thinks are the jobs of the future, and that’s green technology.

Got it. OK. So what does he do first?

OK. Thing number one — let’s talk about the tariffs. He does not roll them back. And actually, he builds on them. For years, for the most part, he just lets the tariffs be. His administration reviews them. And it’s only now, this week, when his administration is going to actually act on the tariffs. And what they’re going to do is raise some of them. They’re going to raise them on strategic green tech things, like electric vehicles, in order to make them more expensive.

And I think it’s important to know the backdrop here, which is since Biden has taken office, China has started flooding global markets with really low-cost green technologies. Solar panels, electric vehicles are the two really big ones. And Biden’s aides are terrified that those imports are going to wash over the United States and basically wipe out American automakers, solar panel manufacturers, that essentially, if Americans can just buy super-cheap stuff from China, they’re not going to buy it from American factories. Those factories are going to go out of business.

So Biden’s goal of manufacturing jobs in clean energy, China is really threatening that by dumping all these products on the American market.

Exactly. And so what he wants to do is protect those factories with tariffs. And that means increasing the tariffs that Trump put on electric vehicles in hopes that American consumers will find them too expensive to buy.

But doesn’t that go against Biden’s goal of clean energy and things better for the environment? Lots of mass-market electric vehicles into the United States would seem to advance that goal. And here, he’s saying, no, you can’t come in.

Right, because Biden isn’t just trying to reduce emissions at all costs. He wants to reduce emissions while boosting American manufacturing jobs. He doesn’t want China to get a monopoly in these areas. And he’s also, in particular, worried about the politics of lost American manufacturing jobs. So Biden does not want to just let you buy cheaper Chinese technologies, even if that means reducing emissions.

He wants to boost American manufacturing of those things to compete with China, which brings us to our second thing that Biden has done to build on Trump’s China policy, which is that Biden has started to act like the Chinese government in particular areas by showering American manufacturers with subsidies.

I see. So dumping government money into American businesses.

Yes, tax incentives, direct grants. This is a way that China has, in the past decades, built its manufacturing dominance, is with state support for factories. Biden is trying to do that in particular targeted industries, including electric vehicles, solar power, wind power, semiconductors. Biden has passed a bunch of legislation that showers those sectors with incentives and government support in hopes of growing up much faster American industry.

Got it. So basically, Biden is trying to beat China at its own game.

Yeah, he’s essentially using tariffs to build a fortress around American industry so that he can train the troops to fight the clean energy battle with China.

And the troops being American companies.

Yes. It’s like, we’re going to give them protection — protectionist policy — in order to get up to size, get up to strength as an army in this battle for clean energy dominance against the Chinese.

Got it. So he’s trying to build up the fortress. What’s the third thing Biden does? You mentioned three things.

Biden does not want the United States going it alone against China. He’s trying to build an international coalition, wealthy countries and some other emerging countries that are going to take on China and try to stop the Chinese from using their trade playbook to take over all these new emerging industrial markets.

But, Jim, why? What does the US get from bringing our allies into this trade war? Why does the US want that?

Some of this really is about stopping China from gaining access to new markets. It’s like, if you put the low-cost Chinese exports on a boat, and it’s going around the world, looking for a dock to stop and offload the stuff and sell it, Biden wants barriers up at every possible port. And he wants factories in those places that are competing with the Chinese.

And a crucial fact to know here is that the United States and Europe, they are behind China when it comes to clean-energy technology. The Chinese government has invested a lot more than America and Europe in building up its industrial capacity for clean energy. So America and its allies want to deny China dominance of those markets and to build up their own access to them.

And they’re behind, so they’ve got to get going. It’s like they’re in a race, and they’re trailing.

Yeah, it’s an economic race to own these industries, and it’s that global emissions race. They also want to be bringing down fossil-fuel emissions faster than they currently are, and this is their plan.

So I guess, Jim, the question in my mind is, Trump effectively broke the seal, right? He started all of these tariffs. He started this trade war with China. But he did it in this kind of jackhammer, non-targeted way, and it didn’t really work economically. Now Biden is taking it a step further. But the question is, is his effort here going to work?

The answer to whether it’s going to work really depends on what your goals are. And Biden and Trump have very different goals. If Trump wins the White House back, he has made very clear that his goal is to try to rip the United States trade relationship with China even more than he already has. He just wants less trade with China and more stuff of all types made in the United States that used to be made in China. That’s a very difficult goal, but it’s not Biden’s goal.

Biden’s goal is that he wants America to make more stuff in these targeted industries. And there is real skepticism from free-market economists that his industrial policies will work on that, but there’s a lot of enthusiasm for it from a new strain of Democratic economists, in particular, who believe that the only chance Biden has to make that work is by pulling all of these levers, by doing the big subsidies and by putting up the tariffs, that you have to have both the troops training and the wall around them. And if it’s going to work, he has to build on the Trump policies. And so I guess you’re asking, will it work? It may be dependent upon just how far he’s willing to go on the subsidies and the barriers.

There’s a chance of it.

So, Jim, at the highest level, whatever the economic outcome here, it strikes me that these moves by Biden are pretty remarkably different from the policies of the Democratic Party over the decades, really going in the opposite direction. I’m thinking of Bill Clinton and NAFTA in the 1990s. Free trade was the real central mantra of the Democratic Party, really of both parties.

Yeah, and Biden is a real break from Clinton. And Clinton was the one who actually signed the law that really opened up trade with China, and Biden’s a break from that. He’s a break from even President Obama when he was vice president. Biden is doing something different. He’s breaking from that Democratic tradition, and he’s building on what Trump did, but with some throwback elements to it from the Roosevelt administration and the Eisenhower administration. This is this grand American tradition of industrial policy that gave us the space race and the interstate highway system. It’s the idea of using the power of the federal government to build up specific industrial capacities. It was in vogue for a time. It fell out of fashion and was replaced by this idea that the government should get out of the way, and you let the free market drive innovation. And now that industrial policy idea is back in vogue, and Biden is doing it.

So it isn’t just a shift or an evolution. It’s actually a return to big government spending of the ‘30s and the ‘40s and the ‘50s of American industrialism of that era. So what goes around comes around.

Yeah, and it’s a return to that older economic theory with new elements. And it’s in part because of the almost jealousy that American policymakers have of China and the success that it’s had building up its own industrial base. But it also has this political element to it. It’s, in part, animated by the success that Trump had making China an issue with working-class American voters.

You didn’t have to lose your job to China to feel like China was a stand-in for the forces that have taken away good-paying middle-class jobs from American workers who expected those jobs to be there. And so Trump tapped into that. And Biden is trying to tap into that. And the political incentives are pushing every future American president to do more of that. So I think we are going to see even more of this going forward, and that’s why we’re in such an interesting moment right now.

So we’re going to see more fortresses.

More fortresses, more troops, more money.

Jim, thank you.

You’re welcome.

Here’s what else you should know today. Intense fighting between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops raged in parts of Northern Gaza over the weekend, an area where Israel had declared Hamas defeated earlier in the war, only to see the group reconstitute in the power vacuum that was left behind. The persistent lawlessness raised concerns about the future of Gaza among American officials. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the return of Hamas to the North left him concerned that Israeli victories there would be, quote, “not sustainable,” and said that Israel had not presented the United States with any plan for when the war ends.

And the United Nations aid agency in Gaza said early on Sunday that about 300,000 people had fled from Rafah over the past week, the city in the enclave’s southernmost tip where more than a million displaced Gazans had sought shelter from Israeli bombardments elsewhere. The UN made the announcement hours after the Israeli government issued new evacuation orders in Rafah, deepening fears that the Israeli military was preparing to invade the city despite international warnings.

Today’s episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Carlos Prieto, Sidney Harper, and Luke Vander Ploeg. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lin, Brendan Klinkenberg, and Lisa Chow. Contains original music by Diane Wong, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

• May 14, 2024   •   33:29 Voters Want Change. In Our Poll, They See It in Trump.
• May 13, 2024   •   27:46 How Biden Adopted Trump’s Trade War With China
• May 10, 2024   •   27:42 Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand
• May 9, 2024   •   34:42 One Strongman, One Billion Voters, and the Future of India
• May 8, 2024   •   28:28 A Plan to Remake the Middle East
• May 7, 2024   •   27:43 How Changing Ocean Temperatures Could Upend Life on Earth
• May 6, 2024   •   29:23 R.F.K. Jr.’s Battle to Get on the Ballot
• May 3, 2024   •   25:33 The Protesters and the President
• May 2, 2024   •   29:13 Biden Loosens Up on Weed
• May 1, 2024   •   35:16 The New Abortion Fight Before the Supreme Court
• April 30, 2024   •   27:40 The Secret Push That Could Ban TikTok
• April 29, 2024   •   47:53 Trump 2.0: What a Second Trump Presidency Would Bring

Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Produced by Nina Feldman ,  Carlos Prieto ,  Sydney Harper and Luke Vander Ploeg

Edited by M.J. Davis Lin ,  Brendan Klinkenberg and Lisa Chow

Original music by Diane Wong ,  Marion Lozano and Dan Powell

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

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Donald Trump upended decades of American policy when he started a trade war with China. Many thought that President Biden would reverse those policies. Instead, he’s stepping them up.

Jim Tankersley, who covers economic policy at the White House, explains.

On today’s episode

Jim Tankersley , who covers economic policy at the White House for The New York Times.

Background reading

Mr. Biden, competing with Mr. Trump to be tough on China , called for steel tariffs last month.

The Biden administration may raise tariffs on electric vehicles from China to 100 percent .

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Luke Vander Ploeg is a senior producer on “The Daily” and a reporter for the National Desk covering the Midwest. More about Luke Vander Ploeg

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