Donald Trump’s trade wars started with an attempt to address perceived trade imbalances with China and defend America’s tech supremacy. After this year’s on-again, off-again trade hostilities, what has he achieved?

After last week’s trade truce, which was finalised at a face-to-face meeting between Trump and China’s Xi Jinping, Trump declared the outcome “truly great” and rated it 12 out of 10.

Xi Jinping knows he has the upper hand over Donald Trump. Credit: Getty Images

The reality, however, didn’t live up to that billing, and in a confrontation that dates back to Trump’s first days in office in his second term, it essentially takes the relationship back almost to where it stood when Joe Biden left the White House.

The escalation of Trump’s trade war this year has, however, further and badly damaged that already tense relationship and revealed an acute US vulnerability which, until then, had been hiding in plain sight.

What began as an attack on China’s exports to the US, along with an effort to stifle its technological advancements, developed into a trade war on everyone else.

While the US has backed down from threatened and, in some instances, briefly imposed escalations of trade tensions with China, it has slapped tariffs on the rest of the world, including on some of its (former?) closest allies and trade partners.

There’s now a level of global mistrust in the US that will outlive the Trump presidency and that has prompted a global scramble to diversify trade, reduce exposure to the US dollar’s dominance of international trade and finance and build new geopolitical relationships. China is a significant beneficiary from America’s losses.

The starting point for the breakdown in the trade relationship with China came during Trump’s first term, when he began slapping tariffs on imports from China because he believed (erroneously) that the big US trade deficit meant America was being ripped off.

He was........

© Brisbane Times