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Notes -
Some explorations of trade imbalances between countries:
Scenario 1
Scenario 2
Scenario 3
Proponents that believe that disparities in the pairwise trade balance between countries must arise from foul play (call it the disparate impact theory of trade I guess) presumably believe that from the perspective of Country A, (1) is ideal. Scenario 2 doesn't differ from (1) except by the unrelated actions of (B) and (C), and scenario (3) is just (1) + (2) and so if those are fine, surely their sum must be fine.
What I think this all gets to is that pairwise analysis isn't really very meaningful.
I would like to add that the way trade works is not that the US magically pays China more than China pays the US. In trade, participants generally pay cash to receive goods of some kind -- resources like oil, consumer products like tamagotchis, ransomware keys to that data which you did not properly back up. If the seller and the buyer can not agree on a price, the trade does not happen.
Now, just because someone in country A and someone in country B agreed on a trade, that does not mean that both countries are happy with it -- if Mexican cartels are buying US weapons, Mexico will probably object.
Of course, if you are a normal country, you can not keep running a trade deficit forever -- you need hard cash to buy stuff from other countries, and that cash has to be earned somehow. The US is special in that it is a global superpower which controls the primary currency of international trade, and China is happy to sell them electronics for freshly printed US dollars.
Tariffs are useful in some situations: perhaps you want to protect your nascent car industry until it gets internationally competitive, perhaps you want to play Defect in response to another party playing Defect to discourage others from instituting tariffs, or perhaps you know that the other country is selling some goods at a loss in order to achieve strategic dominance and want to level the playing field.
But these are all surgical interventions, while Trump's tariffs are like operating the patient in twenty random places in the hope that this will magically increase their well-being.
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