Boiled down, Trump’s tariffs are really all about China.

The story of the month – the story that has pushed Ukraine and Gaza and pretty much everything else off the front page (forgive the anachronistic reference) – is Trump’s tariffs. A 3,900-point drop in the Dow will do that.

This story has its genesis, in part, in the Clinton administration. President Bill Clinton was hellbent on bringing China – a totalitarian communist nation with a struggling economy – into the World Trade Organization.

Clinton’s critics alleged that he and his wife, Hillary, stood to profit personally from giving China the prestige and the enormous economic boost that WTO membership conferred. There is good evidence to suggest that the critics were correct.

Clinton, for his part, told us that bringing China into the WTO would lead to China’s liberalization and its adoption of Western values, all while eventually freeing its 1.4 billion citizens from the yoke of communism.

But it wasn’t just Clinton. George W. Bush, on whose watch China’s WTO membership became official, said this:

Politically, [China] can be a partner in working for peace and security. A China that embraces freedom at home will be a more responsible partner abroad.”

That statement didn’t age well.

What happened instead is that with China enjoying “Most Favored Nation” status, American manufacturers gained access to Chinese manufacturing capacity. However, American companies didn’t go blowing in to help Chinese workers unionize, or to start investing in “green” technologies to make China’s factories more friendly to the environment.

American companies went into China to take advantage of manufacturing unfettered by U.S. environmental regulation, U.S. minimum wage laws, U.S. labor law, U.S. workplace safety regulations, U.S. “green” energy mandates and, indeed, the entire U.S. smorgasbord of rules, restrictions and regulations.

And given just how byzantine and expensive the American regulatory state is, who can blame them?

But there is blame for this. Bringing China into the World Trade Organization effectively gave American manufacturers guilt-free access to slave labor. For American companies it was like being able to eat chocolate eclairs and Blue Bell Ice Cream after every meal without gaining weight.

Since then, upward of 90,000 U.S. manufacturing plants have shut down and millions of manufacturing jobs have evaporated, all at the expense of the American middle class. From a sociological perspective, millions of men who would have otherwise been able to afford to buy homes and raise families, were instead relegated to itinerant employment and permanent second-class status – all for the sake of marginally cheaper consumer goods.

Meanwhile the American economy is now yoked to a corrupt, tyrannical country that has the aim – and is gaining the means – to relegate the whole of the U.S.A. to second-class status.

Yes, the tariffs are scary. My wife’s and my retirement portfolio is, at the moment, even scarier still.

But Trump is at last confronting a problem that must be confronted. That is unless you want your kids saying to your grandkids, “America was the richest nation in the world once. But it’s not anymore because Nana and Grampy wanted a cheaper flatscreen TV.”