Trade negotiations with China are grinding forward, but Beijing now appears to have rebuffed the Trump administration’s top demand. The White House has pushed the Chinese to reduce their bilateral trade surplus with the U.S. by $200 billion. Although they have made some vague commitments to increase American imports, it has become clear these would fall well short of the administration’s target. In fact, even if both governments sincerely wanted to move the trade balance by anything resembling that magnitude, it is unlikely they could do so in a short period.
Fortunately,...