The U.S. Will Lose in Trump's Pointless Trade War

Trump has picked a fight that the U.S. cannot win, and so he is setting up the U.S. to bear enormous costs for nothing.

Adam Posen warns that the U.S. is likely to lose the escalating trade war with China:

The Trump administration is embarking on an economic equivalent of the Vietnam War—a war of choice that will soon result in a quagmire, undermining faith at home and abroad in both the trustworthiness and the competence of the United States—and we all know how that turned out.

The Trump administration may think that it can prevail in a trade war with China, but Posen makes a compelling case that the U.S. is at a significant disadvantage in this conflict. In short, Trump has picked a fight that the U.S. cannot win, and so he is setting up the U.S. to bear enormous costs for nothing. Both the U.S. and China will emerge from this clash worse off than they were before, but the U.S. is likely to suffer bigger losses.