For about a decade now, Americans have known that the free-trade consensus that prevailed during the 1990s and 2000s wasn’t really working. There were basically two reasons for that, and they both had to do with China. First, the speed and disruptiveness of China’s entry into the global trading system destroyed the career trajectories of large numbers of American workers and hurt the economies of whole regions. Second, U.S. complacency about the trajectory of Chinese politics, combined with a massive campaign of technological espionage, hastened and encouraged the rise of a new, hostile superpower. By the mid-2010s, only economists thought that free trade was still an unquestioned good, and the country wasn’t listening to economists the way it used to.

The first policymaker to really go against the consensus was Donald Trump, because if there’s one thing Trump excels at, it’s violating norms. His regime of tariffs, investment restrictions, and export controls, and his bumbling attempts to jawbone companies into putting factories in the U.S., constituted the first halting, haphazard attempt to formulate some kind of alternative to the orthodoxy of the previous decades. The result was pretty mixed. Overall, the outcomes were negative for the U.S., which was hurt by the tariffs and which didn’t see a reshoring boom. But China was hurt more, both by the tariffs and by the export controls. As industrial policy, Trump’s policies failed; as economic warfare, they showed promising signs of effectiveness.