Our China problem.

Wall Street is breathing a sigh of relief over the 90-day pause that the Trump administration has announced regarding the sky-high tariffs he imposed on China several weeks ago. Markets have largely recovered. Your 401(k) looks better. Recession talk has faded.

All good.

If the optimistic statements of the administration pan out, perhaps a deal gets done with China that corrects some of the massive imbalance in trade between us and them.

All good there, too.

But the China problem is far from solved. As we learned during the pandemic, our economy is dangerously tethered to China. Take a minute and close your eyes and remember the empty lots at car dealerships in 2021 and 2022. Those lots were empty because there were thousands of cars fully assembled sitting on assembly plant holding lots that couldn’t be delivered for the want of a microchip or some other component that comes from China – a country that was shut down over the very pandemic that it unleashed upon the world.

Though it gave the markets a momentary case of the vapors, and though it gave Democrats something about which to hyperventilate, Trump’s fusillade of tariffs – all of them ultimately aimed at China, make no mistake – has finally opened the eyes of thinking, discerning Americans to the fact that the United States is dangerously dependent upon a hostile, malfeasant regime for even its most basic needs.

We’re coming to understand that having store shelves filled with cheaper consumer goods may be nice for right now, but those goods aren’t so cheap when you factor in the long-term impact on our national wealth.

Our political and corporate elites are quite happy to pacify us with the savings attendant to buying things made using slave labor (while simultaneously pocketing the fatter profits). Thus pacified, most of us haven’t noticed the trillions of dollars of national wealth transferred to a hostile strategic adversary, or the empty downtowns and vacant shopping malls of once thriving cities and towns in the American heartland that lost the manufacturing jobs that once supported their local economies.

Today if China were to start a war someplace against an ally of ours, we’d find ourselves rendered impotent by China’s threat of an embargo on an entire galaxy of parts and components to keep our economy running, parts and components that our elite corporate titans – aided and abetted by the elite globalists that populate our government – profitably outsourced to China. (And try not to think about a blockade on antibiotics, for which we are dependent upon China to the tune of about 95 percent. That prospect is simply too frightening.)

Plain and simple, American business has a China addiction. The proceeds attendant to feeding that addiction are funding an expansionist, hostile Chinese military. Our dependence on Chinese manufacturing is a latter-day Sword of Damocles of our own making.

Trump’s tariff barrage constitutes a long overdue awakening to that danger and the immediate necessity of dealing with it on our own terms – while so doing is still possible.