In addition to what others have mentioned, this analysis completely ignores the massive trade imbalance that is the underlying cause of the entire situation.
The US keeping higher tariffs doesn’t simply mean that they’re punishing China more than vice-versa, because the US putting tariffs on Chinese imports screws over the US economy dramatically more than it does the Chinese one. This is one of the main reasons why this trade war is so ridiculous (and hilarious), and is a theme going back to the first Trump administration.
It’s of course true that China backed off in a sense when they could have turned the screws, but considering this any kind of capitulation (or cessation of resistance or whatever) is a very crude and superficial look at the situation. More time for “as business as usual as possible” only benefits China. Given everything about China’s character as a geopolitical actor (long-term thinking and level-headedness compared to the west in particular) I don’t think this is surprising at all. China is not the sort of country to continuously react and escalate to a buffoon like this. They’ve demonstrated that they’re the adults in the room, shown the US to be weak, and can return to a relatively normal and non-escalatory position because they know that the more time goes on, the stronger their position is, and the more the imperialist monster will eat itself.
China is playing go while the US takes a shit on a checkers board in their own house and whines about the smell.
I suspect this part is pointing at the real motivation behind this criticism: the author is a Communist Party of Canada member, i.e., unimportant (like it or not, let’s be real here), and so doesn’t like the heat that Losurdo has for Western Marxists for obvious reasons (he is one). He wants Losurdo to
and, generally, show deference to the Western Communist Party theoreticians (like him), making the point only about the “frauds from the academy”. It’s not just about the frauds from the academy though. Our parties and party-like formations are also failures. This is demonstrably true, and if we can’t wrestle with that fact, and seriously investigate its causes, we’re never going to get anywhere.
As it happens, being a Canadian also makes the issue he takes with the colonialism lens pretty suspect. It feels a bit class reductionist to demand that Nazi expansionism be explained in terms of class conflict and only class conflict. Frankly, I think it’s valid to be suspicious of such ideas, particularly when they’re coming from a white man in a settler colony. This criticism reeks of defensiveness in general, and though it may be correct about some weaknesses in Losurdo’s work, I think it’s fundamentally reactionary.