To President Trump’s supporters, the one-sided trade “deals” negotiated with the United Kingdom, Japan and most recently the European Union may seem like victories. They may seem like a vindication of the president’s supposed street-savvy negotiating style.

In reality, they are self-defeating in their economics and harmful to America’s alliances.

Under the trade arrangement concluded at the end of July, the EU will scrap tariffs on U.S. imports and commit to large-scale purchases on American energy and defense systems, as well further U.S. investment. In exchange, the EU gets a U.S. tariff of 15 percent, vastly exceeding average tariff rates across the industrialized world in the post-war era.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the three “deals” are not trade agreements in any meaningful sense. They lack the legal weight that foreign trade agreements carry. Nor do they entail a liberalization of trade — rather, they ratify America’s imposition of new tariff barriers against some of its closest allies, while also extracting concessions from these nations under threat of even higher tariffs.

Because tariffs are effectively taxes on Americans, the U.S. economy and consumers are the first and foremost losers of these new “deals,” especially in sectors where imports from the three partner........

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