It seems so long ago now, but towards the end of the Obama administration, government officials from the United States and China were working diligently to try to conclude a bilateral investment treaty (BIT). There was some uncertainty about whether the two governments would reach an agreement, as well as whether the U.S. Congress would ratify the treaty, but nevertheless, these two leading economic powers were working together towards a joint vision in an important area of global economic governance.

Trade casualties are mounting in both the United States and abroad as President Trump’s tariffs against imports from China, as well as from our allies, begin to be felt. Earlier we reported that U.S. steel producing industries, which employ approximately 140,000 workers, likely would benefit at the expense of the much greater U.S. steel-using industries, which employ 5.5 to 6.5 million U.S. workers. But recent reports indicate that even these U.S. steel producers are experiencing new difficulties as a result of the tariffs.

On June 26, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker met with President Trump at the White House to talk about trade. Afterwards, to the surprise of many (including me), they held a press conference at which they said positive things about the U.S.-EU trade relationship. Then later, President Trump had five positive tweets about the meeting. It was more amicable than anything we’ve seen in U.S. trade policy for many months.

During the first week of June 2018, I had the opportunity to give a talk at the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil. During the trip, a Brazilian reporter asked me about former U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s assertion, made during his February 2018 address at the University of Texas at Austin, that the United States is a better partner for Latin America over the long-term than the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The separation of families on the border is a punishment grossly disproportionate to the offense. The Border Patrol keeps children in cages while their parents, charged with immigration offenses, are held elsewhere. The pictures have drawn outrage, and appropriately so.

For several months, President Trump has been vandalizing the global economy and subverting the rules of international trade with his wrecking ball of tariff indiscretions. Finally, someone in Congress is doing something to stop this menace. Senator Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee, introduced legislation on Wednesday that takes back some of the authority President Trump has been abusing under the guise of protecting national security.

President Donald Trump shocked foreign policy professionals during his presidential campaign when he stated that he was willing to talk to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Earlier this year, he took up Kim’s surprise summit offer, resulting in the foreign policy shocker of the year.

The claim that imported automobiles might represent some sort of threat to U.S. national security hardly merits even a moment’s thought, much less a formal inquiry. To President Trump — who has requested his Commerce Department investigate precisely this question — the inquiry provides a distraction from his mounting legal woes and, perhaps, the opportunity to secure some leverage in the ongoing North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations.

Donald Trump was not the first U.S. presidential candidate to blame foreigners and their trade practices for America’s real and imagined economic woes. That is a time-honored tradition of U.S. electoral politics. But Trump is the first president — at least since Congress began delegating parts of its trade policymaking authority to the executive branch a century ago — to actually believe that protectionism will make America great. That alone makes trade war likely. Add a heaping sense of nationalist grievance and trade war appears imminent.

President Trump’s recent decision to impose tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum was met with Chinese tariffs on U.S. products and agricultural goods. In turn, this has escalated with each country identifying additional barriers to trade. To prevent a damaging trade war, and for our mutual long-term benefit, the United States and China need to negotiate a free trade agreement.