America has never had a 'reciprocal' free trade agreement, it has used the banner of free trade to engage in low level asymmetric trade wars. The stupid mistake they made was to ship their production capability to China, Japan got where they are under their own power, though the degree to which the Japanese bought Japanese products (mainly because of quality) meant that American products with a Japanese equivalent never stood much of a chance of being adopted in Japan.

Free trade is based on merit (quality) and production capability, America has made some costly mistakes with both.

Sanctions will hit the American consumer harder than the exporters.

The Japanese engaged in and got away with things like tariffs on Rossignol under the made up excuse that Japanese snow is unique, and thus only Japanese skis were fit for skiing in Japan. Sure, their snow in some places is "wetter", but we now see western skis doing well there and Japanese skis performing well on non Japanese snow. That's the kind of nonsense our leadership should have stood up to.

Indeed, that is nonsense.

Rossignol is a French company by the way.

But I don't see anything exceptional there, it is similar to the nonsense America engages in vv Canada when it comes to dairy, beef and lumber.

I knew Rossignol was French. It was emblematic of Japanese tactics back then where they engaged in passive aggressive trade manipulation.

> And on balance we experience trade deficits.

Why are trade deficits necessarily bad? The trade deficit represents the spread between savings and investment. If net foreign investment in America is very high, then there will be a trade deficit. This is an accounting identity.

Household debt as a percentage of GDP has been declining in the US for the past decade. This leads one to believe that the trade deficit currently represents high foreign investment in the US.

> And on balance we experience trade deficits.

For years we've been exporting our inflation to other countries for actual physical goods and they keep buying it under the auspices of "reserve currency".

How many trillions of dollars of US debt does China own these days which they happily exchanged to fuel our consumerism?