While you weren't looking — perhaps while you were watching impeachment hearings – the trade war with China went completely off the rails and lost its meaning.
To understand why you have to understand why the US started a trade war with China started in the first place. It started with a very specific investigation — an investigation into China's theft of US intellectual property (IP) using Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
The investigation determined what many in the business community had been talking about for years, the fact that China abused its US partners, stole the IP of American companies, forced those companies to reveal their technology to Chinese counterparts and muscled US firms out of the Chinese economy in favor of state owned enterprises (SOEs).
This, the Trump administration said, was a problem beyond the capacity of the World Trade Organization. It was a problem worth going to economic war over. And so we did.
But since it began this trade war has accomplished absolutely nothing aside from breaking up US supply chains and souring relations between the US and China. And now instead of discussing meaningful ways the Chinese economy will open to US businesses, trade negotiators are reportedly haggling over how many soybeans China will buy.
In fact, the status of the negotiations we're in now sounds a lot like the status of the negotiations back in December 2018, when the US and China temporarily laid down their arms and announced a cessation of hostilities. Back then the New York Times called the treaty — which included a resumption of soybean purchases on China's part — "less a breakthrough than a breakdown averted," and the "Phase 1" deal the administration is currently working on would do much the same thing.
