President Donald Trump is starting a trade war against China at the same that he's starting one against the countries the US needs help with against China. And he's doing this while also trying to undo sanctions on a Chinese company that bipartisan majorities in Congress think might be a real national security threat.
If any of that makes sense to you, odds are your last name is Trump.
For everyone else, though, it's difficult to discern any method to the madness that is Trump's trade policy. Indeed, he's alternated between announcing that he's instituting new tariffs and that he's putting them on hold, like a reality-TV show host trying to gin up ratings by keeping people guessing about what's going to happen next. Which, when you put it that way, actually makes more sense than anything else. Even then, however, we're still left with the question of why, other than maybe force of habit, Trump seems to be trying to run the global economy as if it were just a slightly more involved episode of "The Apprentice."
And the answer is that, against all evidence, he really does believe, as he's put it, that trade wars are good and easy to win - and that this is how you do it. In particular, Trump seems to think that the brewing confrontation with China, a country that really is doing abusive things like forcing foreign companies to transfer over technology, will be such a piece of cake that he doesn't need to enlist our allies in the fight, but can rather launch a simultaneous economic attack on them to try to make them end the very few tariffs they do have on things like our . . . dairy products? Actually, yes.
This is a strategy, if you want to call it that, born of three misconceptions. The first is that countries that buy more than they sell overseas have little to lose from a trade war. The idea is that it's easier for American consumers to switch over to buying non-Chinese goods than it is for Chinese companies to switch over to selling to non-American customers, therefore the Chinese will capitulate first.