You can be at war, as a pacifist, in total denial of reality. That's what the USA did with China. The trade war was really active, but the USA was just taking damage without any response. The non-response was pretty dumb.

The Chinese trade war was going on for a while now. In addition it seems that issues regarding china are one of the things that both parties seem to agree on. Although you are right that there wasn't such an issue with Europe and Mexico before the current administration.

And yet the US pulled out of the deal that would have curtailed Chinese influence in the region ...

I would not expect competence from politicians.

Trade wars across the Atlantic are not new to Trump. See this, for example: https://econlife.com/2018/06/banana-trade-war-2/

This does not contain the article text. Just an image of bananas, some words about the supposed author, some tags, "leave a reply", and a bunch of useless "latest news".

Might be an issue with an ad blocker or something like that. It’s archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190323103101if_/https://econli...

To be fair, the article is not necessarily fantastic, it was just to show that there indeed were trade wars between the US and the EU before Trump.