You could practically hear the cheering on Thursday as critics of President Trump finally got what they’ve waited months for — some indication that tariffs might (finally!) drive prices higher.

Yesterday’s Producer Price Index report showed wholesale prices jumped 0.9 percent over the last month, the biggest gain since June 2022. It followed another benign Consumer Price Index report published earlier in the week, making it all the more surprising. But, more than three-quarters of the gain was driven by services price escalation; there was some rise in the cost of machinery and other end goods, but the impact from tariffs was inconclusive.

Here’s a fact: No one — not Fed Chairman Jay Powell, not Goldman Sachs’ CEO David Solomon, not Paul Krugman, who predicted markets would collapse if Trump were elected in 2016, nor all the talking heads on Bloomberg and elsewhere who have blasted Trump’s tariff regimen — has any idea how his upending of global trade terms will turn out.

There has never been a country that dominated the global economy as the U.S. now does, nor has there ever been a president like Trump determined to take advantage of that clout. Many have compared his tariffs with the stiff duties imposed by the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, but there are huge differences between then and now, which may account for some of the unrelenting negativity about the president’s program.

Today, unlike then, the U.S. is the essential nation for producers of consumer goods. Americans spent $20 trillion last year, compared to $10 trillion by residents of the European Union and $8 trillion by Chinese citizens. Though the U.S. accounted for a larger share of global GDP in 1930 than it does today (35 percent vs. 26 percent), we were not the primary........

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