The good editors of The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece on the challenges to Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent, on the assumption he’s confirmed. The editors, though, have misunderstood some of those challenges.

Hitting China with enormous tariffs will compel Beijing to dig in, not change its economic model, but Mr Bessent might use the threat to urge China to recognize its self-interest in rebalancing.

It’s not important whether the People’s Republic of China changes its economic model. The nation is an enemy of the United States, openly averring its goal of supplanting us on the world stage, and from there controlling our actions on that stage. The PRC needs to be isolated and contained.

By contrast, a mercantilist purchasing deal would fail to address China’s fundamental problem. The Trump administration would be better positioned to rebalance with China if it weren’t simultaneously declaring economic war on the rest of the world.

Mercantilism is irrelevant to the PRC’s fundamental problem, which the editors don’t recognize in their piece. The PRC’s fundamental problem is their shrinking population which is caused by their birth rate being far below even the replacement rate necessary to maintain an existing level. A critical subset and outcome of that problem is that its population is aging and already doesn’t have enough workers to sustain their retired and aged citizens, much less to man its factories. Aside from raw bigotry, this is another reason for the forced labor of Uighurs in PRC factories.

There’s less than no need to rebalance with the PRC: that nation is an enemy nation bent on replacing and controlling us. Rebalancing, along any dimension that doesn’t include gaining, regaining, and expanding our superiority, would only facilitate its effort.

It’s true enough that an economic war with the rest of the world is counterproductive, but it’s relevant to the need to isolate and contain the PRC only to the extent that mercantilist tariffs on so much of the rest of the world waters down the effects of foreign policy tariffs on the PRC and our ability to get other nations to support that isolation.

At bottom, the editors have confused tariffs used to influence an enemy nation—foreign policy tariffs—with mercantilist tariffs—protectionist tariffs used to make other nations’ exports to us more expensive relative to our domestically produced products. I’m surprised that the editors do not understand the distinction.