While you weren't looking, the trade war with China went off the rails

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@"BusinessInsider" said:

• America's trade war with China has lost its way.
• Instead of pushing for structural change in China's managed economy, the Trump administration is negotiating to get US-China trade where it was before the tit-for-tat tariffs started.
• This story is starting to sound like a loop, and it's unclear how the Trump administration will get out of it.

To understand why, you have to know why the US started a trade war with China in the first place. It began with a very specific investigation, one using Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to examine claims of Chinese theft of US intellectual property.

The investigation determined what many in the business community had been talking about for years: 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.

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 so far this trade war has accomplished 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.
Source:Business Insider