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f there is one issue that defines President Trump more than any other, it’s trade. Since the 1980s, Trump has been critical of trade deals that seem to favor other countries. Since his 2016 election campaign, the president has regularly tweeted his views that “the US has been ripped off by other countries for years,” and that with the US facing a massive trade deficit — totaling $800 billion in 2017 — trade wars are “easy to win.”

At the beginning of June, Trump made good on his threats by imposing tariffs on EU and Canadian steel imports. A few days later, the G7 summit ended in acrimony with no agreement on trade, and then the US imposed tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods.

But is President Trump correct that the US is a victim of bad trade deals and deficits with other countries?

With the dangers of an international trade war likely to hover over the remainder of Trump’s presidency, I turned to a trio of experts with this question. This proved no easy task, as academic and policy elites are heavily skewed against many of Trump’s policies, but discussion led to a more nuanced picture than the media portrays. Although the three offered varying degrees of support or opposition in other areas, they all agreed that Trump might be on the right track with China.

Dr. Benn Steil, director of international economics, Council on Foreign Relations

President Trump’s emphasis on the deficit and trade deals is misguided for a few reasons. One is that there is no relationship between deficits and growth, as the administration claims. I’ve shown that higher deficits go with higher growth.

Additionally, the trade deficit is due to the fact that the US consumes more than it saves. So blocking specific imports from abroad is like squeezing a balloon; it just makes the air go elsewhere.

For example, America has been energy independent for the last few years because of fracking. So the energy deficit has gone down, but the overall deficit hasn’t; it’s just gone elsewhere. If Trump wants to address the deficit, he needs policies that raise savings levels in the US. But these tariffs are counterproductive because most imports are intermediate, not final, products. They only make US businesses less competitive.

Now with regard to China, the president is on to something. There’s little doubt that they violate trade norms with high barriers to trade and through intellectual property theft. The EU agrees and is happy to combine forces to pressure China through legal means at the World Trade Organization and restricting Chinese access to our markets. Trump believes that he can win a trade war with China, but he shouldn’t so at the same time as fighting the EU.

Dr. Michael Ivanovitch, independent economic analyst, former senior economist at the OECD

Numbers show that the US is losing big on its international trade. Two things have to be done. First, Washington has to open up market access by asking its trade partners to review their tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. Second, countries running systematic trade surpluses have to change their economic policies. They have to rely less on exports and more on their own consumption and investments for economic growth.

Can a deficit be negotiated away? Yes. Countries relying on exports for growth are producing more than they consume. The excess production is dumped on foreign markets. In cases where this has become a structural feature of the economy, such as in Germany, China, and Japan, these countries have to increase their domestic spending and open up their markets so that foreigners can sell them something. Their surpluses would then go down and their partners’ deficits would become less of a problem. These are constant recommendations by the G20 summits [the world’s main economic forum] to balance out the world economy. Remember, large and systematic trade imbalances are damaging and destabilizing for the world as a whole.

Tariffs won’t damage US industry as some claim. If Europeans were to bring their import tariffs on American cars down from 10 percent to 2 percent — that’s what the US charges on European car imports — then we could sell more cars in Europe. The same for other items, where the US is just looking to even out the playing field — not to take advantage of its trade partners the way the Chinese, the Europeans, and the Japanese do.

China, Canada, and the EU are running large trade surpluses with the US. Trump just wants them to square their trade books with the US. That’s why he’s lumping China together with allies like Canada and the EU.

Dr. John Hemmings, director of the Henry Jackson Society’s Asia Studies Centre

Looking at this from a geopolitical perspective, rather than as an economist, Trump’s prescription is flawed. By picking fights with everyone at once, you lose them all.

There are two games here. The China game, and everyone else. The big game, as far as the US is concerned, is the China game. Take steel production: China produces more than 800 million metric tons, and the US only 80 million. China is larger than all the world’s steel producers combined. The other game is against America’s allies, which is a Hobbesian way of looking at the world. If you don’t separate these two issues, you fragment the coalition you need vis-?-vis China.

Peter Navarro, director of Trump’s National Trade Council, was seen as crazy. He’s not; in fact, he has a very strong point. The policy of not going after China was wrong. With Xi Jinping’s China 2025 plan, the government is subsidizing champions in artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, and they have no rules. They’re going to become the world’s biggest economy, and this is the last period when we can influence them to obey WTO rules.

Now since Truman’s days there was calculation that we could do a trade-off of the economy for alliances. So the Germans got the Marshall Plan, and the Asians got military protection enabling investment in their economies, plus tariff-free access to the US. Broadly speaking, I’m supportive of efforts to redress the trade balance, but we need that coalition.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 716)