On Wednesday, President Donald Trump abruptly announced a 90-day pause on most of his planned country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs — with the notable exception of the People’s Republic of China. In so strikingly singling out China as the focus of America’s economic and geopolitical ire, Trump was not merely clarifying that the United States views China and its regnant Communist Party as our leading 21st-century threat — he was also taking yet another notable step toward fulfilling his own lifelong goal of fundamentally resetting the terms of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship.

During the first year of his first presidential term, Trump directed his Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to investigate Chinese trade practices. The subsequent report was damning, and Trump implemented numerous tariffs on Chinese goods — tariffs that, to his rare credit, former President Joe Biden largely kept in place and even built upon. In addition to his first-term tariffs, Trump also filed a formal World Trade Organization case against China, alleging deceptive trade practices and intellectual property theft. As Trump put it at the time in a tweet: “Today I directed the U.S. Trade Representative to take action so that countries stop CHEATING the system at the expense of the USA!”

Trump’s tariff escalation last week against Communist China — even as he paused many other tariffs to allow for bilateral trade negotiations and give jittery bond markets some relief — is a natural culmination of the work to reset the U.S.-China economic relationship that he commenced during his first term.

Most important, Trump has not just been outspoken on the issue of trade with China — he has been proven correct.

Ever since Richard Nixon’s fateful trip to visit Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972, American elites of all political stripes promised that welcoming China into the global economy would be good for all parties involved. American consumers, we were reliably informed, would get cheaper and more abundant goods; American exporters would get a massive and exciting new market to peddle their wares; and the Chinese people themselves would soon reap the rewards of the “political liberalization” that could only come about through “economic liberalization.” This was the dominant thinking when Nixon visited China over a half-century ago, when the George W. Bush administration welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and when Barack Obama hosted and toasted Xi Jinping at the White House in 2015.

Suffice it to say it hasn’t exactly all worked out according to plan.

In Shanghai in 2022, amid the communist country’s interminable COVID-19 lockdowns, government drones with loudspeakers blasted: “Control your soul’s thirst for freedom. Do not open your windows and sing.” Chinese companies have engaged in serial intellectual property theft, brazenly stealing American companies’ trade secrets and illegally repackaging them for export at heavily subsidized prices.

TikTok, one particularly problematic Chinese export, is mental fentanyl designed to addict the Western masses and dupe them into poisonous ideologies — and Communist Party spyware, to boot. Speaking of (actual) fentanyl, China is largely responsible for that particular drug killing hundreds of thousands of vulnerable young Americans. Meanwhile, China sends “spy balloons” across the North American continent and routinely allies with the worst state actors on the planet. And if that weren’t bad enough, America’s manufacturing base and national security-critical supply chain infrastructure have been decimated — by China.

For far too long, elites have led America to disaster when it comes to trade with China. They have acted in myopic and ruinous fashion, bringing calamity to the nation they purport to love. America’s trade war with the rogue Chinese superpower must happen.