A couple of weeks ago you couldn’t turn on the television or read a news story without the words “trade war” jumping out of it. The economy was in “free fall” and the stock market was going to kill us all.

Whatever happened to all that? Reality, as it always does, inserted itself. Things returned to normal, at least for now. It’s time for President Trump to follow suit, accept the “win” on tariffs, retreat from most of them and focus all his energy on China, which was the real target all along.

As I write this on Tuesday, the S&P 500 index is down less than 1 percent from where it was a month ago. The Dow is off by less than 3.5 percent. That’s not nothing in either case, but it’s closer to nothing than it is to the apocalypse we seemed to be facing on "liberation day."

But the truth is, everyone wants to sell to the U.S. Nations big and small are looking to please the U.S. on the issue of tariffs by eliminating theirs on our goods.

I suspect the point of all of this was to put pressure on China, the biggest of the Big fish. Picking an indirect trade dispute with China is a much better strategy than going at it directly. When the Chinese raised their tariffs even higher in response to Trump’s move, it........

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