In a way, Trump was trying to do to China what Reagan had done to Japan in 1985 under the so-called Plaza Accord, which forced it to devalue the yen massively and, thus, to limit the capacity of Japanese exporters to profit from American sales and, more broadly, from the US trade deficit. The Japanese government’s acquiescence had been swift and silent, leading Japanese capitalism into a permanent slump from which it never truly recovered.
