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IN HIS trade war with China, President Donald Trump appears to have the upper hand. The new tariffs his administration unveiled this week, which will raise the share of Chinese imports subject to levies to at least 44%, are unlikely to dampen America’s sizzling economy, or to boost inflation by much. Though some firms will be disrupted, most Americans will not notice the damage (see article). China, however, is under pressure. Its growth seems to be slowing and its stockmarket is down almost a quarter from its peak in January. China’s government has announced retaliatory tariffs against American goods, but it is fast running out of imports to tax.

During conflict, an imbalance in strength should lead to a swift resolution. Here the side with the advantage may prolong the war. That is because America has several goals, some of them unachievable.

Unjust war

The official justification for the tariffs is rooted in anger about Chinese mercantilism—anger which is shared across the rich world. China gives vast and opaque subsidies to its state-owned firms. It requires exporters to hand over intellectual property as a condition of access to its market. The world’s consumers benefit from the artificially cheap imports that result. But trade of this sort is unsustainable, politically and economically. America is right to demand that China play fair.

That is not the limit of Mr Trump’s ambition, however. He also wants to eliminate America’s trade deficit with China, which he mistakenly sees as a transfer of wealth. He has broadcast his desire to force manufacturing supply chains back to America. And his administration has identified China as a strategic competitor. Some of the president’s advisers seem to relish the chance to do it economic harm.

The White House may argue that China’s abuse of the rules, the trade deficit and the decline of American industry are one and the same. They are not. Even without subsidies, China, like most other emerging markets, would enjoy a substantial cost advantage over America. The trade deficit, meanwhile, is tied to the difference between domestic saving and investment. Tariffs might cut the bilateral deficit with China, but America would find it nearly impossible to shrink its overall deficit without engineering a domestic recession.

The goal of rolling back decades of American deindustrialisation is a pipe-dream. Should America succeed in forcing supply chains back onshore, it will find that many fewer jobs are attached, because of rapid automation and productivity growth. American manufacturing’s share of GDP has fallen only by a fifth since 2000, while its share of employment is down by a third. Besides, the lowest-skilled jobs would not go to America, but to low-wage Asian countries, like Vietnam.

There is a faint hope that Mr Trump’s advisers and allies will play good cop to his bad cop, using tariffs as a bargaining chip in rewriting global trading rules to constrain China’s mercantilism—a legitimate goal. More probably, the bad cop—who is, after all, in charge—will refuse to be stood down, because of his obsession with trade deficits and jobs and because Chinese leaders seem unwilling or unable to contemplate reforms that would strengthen moderate voices in Team Trump.

The prospects for any truce with China look grim. Recent history suggests that trade disputes are hard to settle. Tariffs imposed on Chinese tyres in 2009 under President Barack Obama, a free-trader, lasted three years. Mr Trump’s recent trade agreement with Mexico does not include an end to levies on its steel and aluminium. America’s latest escalation against China is no more likely to be speedily reversed.

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