Indeed, they are, and the one the People’s Republic of China has been inflicting on us for years is especially so.  For the duration of the PRC’s economic war—of which its trade “war” is just one campaign—they’ve been conducting cyber espionage, stealing our intellectual property, extorting technology transfer as a condition of doing business inside the PRC, demanding government-approved backdoors into our companies’ core software as another condition of doing business there, even poisoning the powdered milk, pet food, and plywood they sell to us.

I sympathize with Farmer Blake Hurst and his fellows, but the sad fact is that no war is bloodless for either side, and often the winner suffers, in the near term, the greatest damage and casualties.  Beyond that simple fact, too, is this: the damage done Hurst, et al., is done by the PRC with its assault on our economy, it is not done by our resisting that assault.

So I ask: what’s the alternative? What would Hurst—and Progressive-Democrat naysayers (of which Hurst is not at all one)—have us do instead?

What if we lose this economic war?  How well does anyone think it would work out for us were the PRC to win and so to dominate?  What does anyone see as the benefit of a dominant PRC dictating terms to us?  Demanding not the transfer of our factories to them, but the transfer of our intellectual property and our technology to them?