Trump’s deal with China follows a familiar script. Trump imposed preposterously high tariffs on China of 145 percent, effectively a boycott. China retaliated by imposing its own tariffs of 125 percent and blocking exports of critical materials such as rare earths that America needs.

Predictably, the damage was expected to be massive. So Trump needed an escape hatch. Once again, his administration has "suspended" the exorbitant tariffs, lowering them to 30 percent—the same range as the current tariffs of 25 percent on much of China’s exports. The Chinese reciprocated by cutting tariffs on U.S. exports to 10 percent.

The "suspension" of the higher tariffs will be in place for 90 days, while a joint working group addresses more fundamental issues. This will not solve the immediate looming shortage of Chinese imports that has been building for over a month, and even 30 percent is a stiff tariff. But more fundamentally, the deeper issues dividing the U.S. from China will not be solved in 90 days, if ever, and today China has the upper hand.

At bottom, the problem is China’s entire mercantilist system, in which state-led capitalism creates or captures advantage in technology after technology and product after product. Even after Biden’s industrial policies, which Trump is disavowing, the U.S. has nothing comparable.

China is not about to jettison a system that has served it well, certainly not in 90 days. And China has powerful allies in the U.S., who like the cheap labor that produces cheap inputs, and are dependent on supply chains based in China.

The pushback from U.S. industry was one reason why Trump had to make a temporary face-saving deal. With every year that goes by, China becomes more and more dominant in more technologies.

Another thorny problem is the intimate relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese industry, which facilitates espionage, both industrial and political. China denies that this occurs, but it is pervasive. Huawei, for instance, is now the world’s largest seller of smartphones and a leader in advanced technologies; it has alliances with numerous Western tech companies, and American efforts to quarantine it have largely failed. There are dozens of other examples.

China’s business model also includes making coercive deals with Western "partners" that included forced technology transfer. Many U.S. companies go along, taking a short-run perspective in which they make a lot of money. It’s not clear how this can be stopped.

China is expert at slow-rolling the West—making commitments and then finding loopholes. None of this will be solved in 90 days either.

And then there are China’s territorial ambitions. It’s hard to imagine any kind of grand bargain in which China relinquishes its claims on Taiwan, particularly given Trump’s lunatic demands for territorial annexations. Unlike the U.S. and Greenland or Canada, Taiwan at least was historically part of China.

So Trump’s adventure in creating a de facto boycott of China, and then his pullback, leaves the U.S.-China relationship exactly where it was, with no progress toward the deeper issues. If anything, China has a lot more leverage on the U.S. than vice versa, and is more astute about using it.

The most interesting thing about the deal was the role of Scott Bessent. Trump dispatched Bessent to lead the U.S. side of the weekend talks in Geneva, and once again it was Bessent who talked Trump off the ledge—as he did when he persuaded Trump to suspend his insane "reciprocal tariffs" and to stop threatening Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell.

Trump hates to be constrained by minders, but Bessent gets a pass as the Trump-whisperer. Bessent has saved Trump from some of the worst self-inflicted crises. But not even Bessent can work miracles when it comes to the deeper conflicts dividing the U.S. and China.