No one knows what the United States wants on trade—or even if there is any strategy at all. Tariffs are coming and going, and the views of U.S. President Donald Trump appear to be changing by the day as his officials struggle to offer even remotely plausible explanations for his unpredictable actions and sudden backtracking.

Amid all the chaos, one country seems to think that it knows the goal. On April 21, the Chinese Commerce Ministry warned other governments against striking any trade deals with the United States that damage Chinese interests. If Beijing’s assumption is correct that Trump’s strategy is to force other countries to decouple from China, then Washington’s approach is a risky one that could backfire in at least three ways.

The idea that Trump is trying to force other economies to curb their ties to China would help explain why Chinese goods are the only ones currently facing U.S. tariffs of up to 145 percent, while Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” on everyone else are on pause. If decoupling is the goal, then Washington’s plan would entail compelling governments around the world to impose their own trade barriers on China—or face the reimposition of steep tariffs at the end of the 90-day grace period. Recent declarations by U.S. officials give credence to the idea that Washington is trying to build a global coalition against Beijing: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted that once the United States and its allies strike an economic agreement, they will be able to “approach China as a group.”

The first flaw with a decoupling plan is that it could hurt the United States more than China. The International Monetary Fund reckons that trade wars will shave 0.9 percentage points off U.S. GDP growth this year, compared to an estimated hit of only 0.6 percentage points on China. Basic economics help to explain this. At $439 billion in 2024, U.S. goods imports from China are more than three times greater than Chinese goods imports from the United States—meaning that U.S. companies will have to cough up far more in tariffs than Chinese ones.

The structure of U.S.-China trade offers an additional clue as to why the U.S. economy looks set to suffer more than China’s. China supplies roughly three-quarters of U.S. imports of certain high-tech, hard-to-substitute electronic gadgets, such as smartphones and computer monitors. With no easy way to ramp up production in the United States and no alternative suppliers in sight, U.S. consumers will soon face steep price rises for electronic goods. By contrast, China could fare reasonably well without U.S. imports; the country mostly imports low-end, easy-to-substitute goods from the United States, such as oil and soybeans.

China also has a few aces up its sleeve with which to inflict pain to the United States—and its potential decoupling pals—by weaponizing access to critical supplies. Medicines come to mind, as Chinese firms produce nearly half of global supplies for antibiotic precursor ingredients. Yet China’s leverage is even greater in the field of rare earths—a group of17 metals that are crucial for the green transition, digital hardware, and defense equipment. On April 7, China mandated producers to seek export permits for sales to the United States of seven of these elements. Given that Chinese firms hold about 90 percent of the global processing capacity for rare earths, the decision sent shock waves through global supply chains. If Chinese bureaucrats drag their feet to process the permits, the move could have huge ripple effects. Two of the targeted metals—dysprosium and terbium—are critical for building jet engines and electric vehicles, and they are particularly hard to substitute.

The second issue with Trump’s decoupling plan is that it is not clear that all countries around the world would really side with the United States if they needed to pick a side. Europe is the biggest prize here, and recent U.S. actions mean that de-risking from China has moved down on the to-do list for European policymakers. There are practical reasons for this: EU policymakers spend the vast majority of their time thinking about Trump these days, limiting their bandwidth to deal with China. And recent events suggest that the likelihood of a rapprochement between Brussels and Beijing is rising (arguably from a low base) to higher levels than Washington may assume. In April, for example, the European Commission agreed to restart talks with China regarding EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, a major irritant in the EU-China relationship.

Ignoring Bessent’s warning that the EU would be “cutting” its “own throat” if it cozied up to China, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had a chat with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in early April. The readout of the chat suggests that Brussels has missed the U.S. memo to decouple from China: During their talk, von der Leyen and Li agreed to hold a major EU-China summit in Beijing in July. It is hard to imagine that such an event will not produce headline-grabbing deliverables, such as Chinese pledges to invest more in Europe in return for EU concessions on the electric-vehicle tariff front. Pressure to ink such a deal is also coming from some EU member states; before flying to Beijing for an official visit, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called for a review of EU-China relations—a clear rebuke to Washington. In a sure sign that Beijing is also itching to seal a deal, it is preparing to lift the sanctions that it imposed in 2021 on five members of the European Parliament who had been vocal in criticizing China, clearing a major ratification hurdle for any potential deal.

Elsewhere in the world, the picture does not look more promising for U.S. decoupling endeavors. China is the largest trading partner of most countries, whose governments would probably think twice before severing ties with Beijing. And the country’s huge global economic footprint goes beyond trade: Whereas U.S. firms remain the world’s top supplier of foreign direct investment by far ($404 billion in 2023), Chinese ones are also major players; at $148 billion invested in 2023, they are in the same league as those from Japan and the EU.

In turn, the logical strategy for most countries will be to preserve ties to both the United States and China—for instance, by offering Trump concessions that look sexy on paper but mean little in practice. Japan, for example, is looking to make cosmetic changes to its car safety rules to appease Trump, who has long been making incorrect claims about Japanese and EU auto regulations.

This highlights the third flaw of U.S. decoupling plans: A request to ditch China would be a huge ask at a time when Trump’s offer to the rest of the world is unclear. Many policymakers admit that they consider the United States—not China—to be the top threat in the world today. Among U.S. allies, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric (such as his absurd claim that the EU was formed to “screw the United States”), threats to seize Greenland (and thus provoke a war among NATO allies), and catastrophic meeting in February with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office have hit U.S. credibility so badly that siding with the United States has become politically toxic. Many allies also wonder about the merits of any deal that Trump could undo on a whim.

The idea that countries will happily side with the United States could hold true if the country was still the sole global hegemon with no viable alternative in sight. Yet this is no longer the case, and Beijing is seizing the golden opportunity to appear as the adult in the room and a viable alternative to a hostile Washington. Shortly after Trump’s so-called Liberation Day on April 2, when he announced his so-called reciprocal tariffs, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a video about U.S. tariffs, with a narrator’s voice asking, “Do you want to live in a world like this?”

Coming from a dictatorship that shows little respect for human rights, this question may appear ironic, but it is quickly gaining traction around the world. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping was preparing to embark on a trip to Southeast Asia earlier this month, a Cambodian official told the Economist that his country is “[a] small state, punished by the US. … And now Xi Jinping, as the leader of the second-largest economy, comes to us. So that helps to build our confidence. It is very emotional.”

In his 1976 book The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo Cipolla set out to characterize stupidity by using a few simple rules. One of them suggests that stupid people act in ways that are detrimental both to themselves and to others, without deriving any benefits from their actions. If Trump’s trade goal is a global decoupling from China, then the likely backfiring suggests that it could well meet the criteria of Cipolla’s rule.