Let’s step back for a moment and recognize where we are right now. The United States has launched a trade war with the world’s second-largest economy, China. Together, the two account for almost 45% of global output and more than 20% of global trade. Do we have a sense of where these growing tensions will lead?

It would be easy to blame the Trump administration for shooting first and thinking later.

The truth is, the U.S. has been sleepwalking into increased economic warfare with China for several years, probably starting around President Barack Obama’s second term. All previous measures, however, were small-bore compared with where we are now. Tariffs against most Chinese goods are at 145%, and China’s tariffs against most American goods are at 125%.

China and Xi Jinping played an important, maybe central role, in the rupturing of relations. In 2015, before Trump was elected the first time, Xi announced his major new “Made in China 2025” economic project, an ambitious set of policies explicitly designed to make China less dependent on Western technology. Xi had already aroused U.S. suspicions by making a series of foreign policy moves that were more ambitious, adventurous and militaristic than his predecessors. Add to this the reality that trade with China had caused job losses in America (especially in electorally important states), and the rise of more hawkish U.S. views regarding China was inevitable.

But would a less-entangled relationship reduce strategic risk? First, decoupling of the two economies would make the U.S. poorer. Under one tariff scenario, Oxford Economics said U.S. GDP could be 1.4% lower than it would be otherwise. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth lost annually.

Every U.S. action will produce a Chinese reaction. Consider technology. While Washington has valid reasons to limit Beijing’s access to the highest-end chips, has it been effective? In chipmaking and in artificial intelligence, Chinese firms such as Huawei and DeepSeek appear to be able to produce results that are close to the cutting edge but often at a fraction of the American cost.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang this week noted that half of all AI researchers in the world are Chinese and that China is just slightly behind the U.S. in overall AI capability. He also explained, more crucially, that the country that “wins” in technology is sometimes the one that applies innovations fast and well — not the first-mover. So, have Washington’s expensive and cumbersome bans on technology only spurred China to innovate and become a fast follower, and could it end up in a better place than if these bans had never been enacted in the first place? It’s an uncomfortable question, but it must be asked.

Finally, what would a world in which the U.S. and China have little economic relationship with each other look like? Keeping the two countries deeply intertwined economically — trading, investing and interacting with each other — is a force that makes outright conflict more complicated.

A cautionary tale comes from the past. In 1940, as Japanese aggression in Asia grew, the U.S. placed an embargo on the trade of certain items with Tokyo. In July 1941, the U.S. froze Japanese assets and cut off oil exports to Tokyo in response to Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia. At the time, Japan imported nearly 90% of its oil from the U.S., and the embargo left it with very limited strategic reserves.

The result was not Japanese capitulation. It was Pearl Harbor. Cut off from critical imports and seeing no diplomatic off-ramp, Tokyo concluded that war was preferable to strangulation. It’s not a perfect analogy — a militaristic Japan was choosing war to build an Asian empire — but it is a reminder that sanctions, tariffs, decoupling and isolation do not have a history of ending in peace and prosperity.

Email: fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com.