To be fair, a lot of countries used methods to get rich (or try to) that are absolutely despicable and far, far worse than IP theft: slavery, colonization, stra

To be fair, a lot of countries used methods to get rich (or try to) that are absolutely despicable and far, far worse than IP theft: slavery, colonization, straight up plundering, genocide, war. Basically every country of moderate size and of decent wealth today has at least part of that wealth attributable to something that could be called truly and utterly despicable. I think that until maybe 70 years ago, countries did whatever they could to get ahead. If it was possible to accomplish, and it provided an advantage for the country, the country would do it. Nowadays, countries mostly do what they can get away with. The amount of things they can get away with has shrunk over the years, but there's still a hell of a lot of unexpected leeway, particularly if you have something someone else wants. For example, you can infer that Europe having cheap natural gas is more important than doing something about the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Ultimately, that's it: in 2018, countries can enforce IP law a bit better than 300 years ago, and as a result they are going to. I don't think there's any American campaign to be more lenient on China for IP theft and I don't see such a campaign gaining traction. It certainly is interesting to watch the whole thing play out though.