“Don’t worry about China. It will all be fine!”

That joke probably isn’t going to get old. Or no time soon, anyway.

Late last week, Donald Trump told America a “sinister,” “hostile” Xi Jinping had been “lying in wait” for an opportunity to spring rare earth export controls on America as part of a bid to leverage China’s critical minerals monopoly in the service of world domination.

48 hours — and one bad day on Wall Street — later, the same Xi Jinping was a “highly respected” man who just “had a bad moment,” according to the same Donald Trump.

Trump’s about-face facilitated a turnabout in US equities which kicked off the new week with a so-called “TACO” rally. Then, on Tuesday, “sinister,” scheming China was back it. Back to being “hostile,” which in this case meant slapping sanctions on American subsidiaries of a South Korean shipping colossus.

The move was an apparent rejoinder to Washington’s sweeping efforts to revive US shipbuilding by way of taxes and other punitive measures on China-made vessels, all aimed at breaking what the administration (not incorrectly) judges to be a Chinese shipping monopoly.

As I put it dryly in April, “one way to disrupt a foreign shipping monopoly or otherwise reclaim lost commercial maritime sovereignty is to build your own ships.” But that’s a suboptimal solution for America because it requires a lot of time (which America doesn’t have in this context) and hard work (which today’s Americans are allergic to).

A long time ago, Americans relished these kinds of challenges. Nothing was impossible for those Americans. Just ask a dead German soldier at Normandy. But those days are long gone. Just ask an almost dead obese American plodding around Costco with an eight-gallon container of Jif.

The US doesn’t have an obesity epidemic, it has a laziness epidemic and an epidemic of over-indulgence. For the vast majority of fat people in America, losing weight is as simple as diet and exercise, the same way restoring a semblance of self-respect in the ship-building arena is as “simple” as building some ships.

The problem is that the fatter you get, the harder it is to stop eating and get off your ass, just like the further behind you fall in ship-building, the harder it is to catch up. By and by, you’d rather just die than exercise and you’d rather just tax other people’s ships than build your own.

China’s more than happy to let Americans Hostess themselves to death, but they’re not so keen on the shipping levies which, when combined with Beijing’s desire to attain maximum leverage ahead of planned Trump-Xi talks next month in South Korea, explains why Xi’s Commerce Ministry on Tuesday rolled out what the Party’s calling maritime “countermeasures.”

“The US’s Section 301 investigation and measures against China’s shipbuilding industries seriously violate international law and basic norms governing international relations, and severely damage the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies,” MofCom said, in a statement, adding that Hanwha Marine Corporation’s US subsidiaries “have assisted and supported the US government’s investigations, endangering my country’s sovereignty, security and development interests.”

(One of the best things about official statements from China is the imperative of referring to the nation as “my country.” I don’t know if that’s something that comes about as a result of translation error, but it never ceases to elicit a chuckle on my end. You can imagine the next US jobs report — assuming there is another US jobs report — beginning with this: “Total nonfarm payroll employment in my country changed little in September.”)

Hanwha Marine’s publicly-traded. In Seoul. The shares tanked — or sank — on Tuesday, as illustrated above.

It’s possible this could disrupt or otherwise throw a spanner in the works for a key pillar of Trump’s trade deal with the South Koreans. In August, South Korea succeeded in talking Trump down to a 15% tariff rate on the country’s exports to American in exchange for a mostly nebulous investment pledge with a $150 billion price tag.

Part and parcel of that pledge was a non-binding commitment on Seoul’s part to help the US revive its shipbuilding industry. But South Korea’s business lobby also wants to invest in AI, biotech and nuclear power, and it wasn’t clear what part of the $150 billion would go to ships, or even anything to do with ships. No breakdown was provided, nor did Seoul commit to a timeline for the investments.

Scott Bessent — who on Monday called China’s new rare earth curbs “a bazooka [pointed] at the supply chains and the industrial base of the entire free world” — will have an opportunity to chat with a relatively high-ranking Chinese official this week in Washington, where important people are gathered for the IMF/World Bank fall meetings.

Trump was mum on China’s shipping countermeasures through noon on Tuesday. A quick look at his TruthSocial feed revealed a plug for Giorgia Meloni’s new book (Don Jr. wrote the forward) and a critique of TIME’s latest coverage. “Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time,” Trump complained. “They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!”