President Trump’s wish list of all he would like to do is so bizarre that it’s necessary to draw the line between fantasy and reality.

He can’t be serious about making Canada the 51st state. He’s got to be just yakking about annexing Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. And it’s difficult to imagine he’s going to start wars in Central America or the Middle East for the sake of recovering the Panama Canal or turning Gaza into a lovely beachfront zone while dispersing its Palestinian citizenry to Egypt and Jordan.

Getting past these headline-grabbing flights into fantasy, however, we come down to the hard reality of what Trump is doing about America’s incredible trade deficits — not just with China, which netted a stupendous $295.4 billion from trade with the U.S. last year, but also with America’s Northeast Asian allies.

Japan and South Korea’s 2024 trade surpluses with the U.S. amounted to $68.5 billion and $66 billion each, just ahead of Canada, at $63.3 billion. Then there’s Taiwan, the independent island which China, vowing to take over, bullies with air and naval exercises. Taiwan had a surplus with the U.S. of $73.9 billion.

Trump is imposing stiff tariffs on all of them — notably on chips made in Taiwan and steel and aluminum from China and South Korea.

American diplomats and trade negotiators have been complaining for years about what they see as the unfair trading practices of all these countries. China ranks as the worst offender, but talks with Japan and South Korea are always tendentious despite their........

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