It is impossible to exaggerate what a dangerous cliff the U.S. and China are perched on today.

If the current trade dispute tips over into a full-blown economic war — and that spreads to Chinese students and scientists being thrown out of America and American business executives out of China and that spreads to all the investments we’ve made in each other’s countries being ripped out — the world as we’ve known it for the last four decades is going to be replaced with something much uglier, less prosperous, less stable and less able to meet global challenges, like climate change and cybercrime, that are barreling down on us.

This has become a really bad play. We have a juvenile, unstable U.S. president actually enacting trade policy via Twitter — ignoring the advice of his experts — and we have a pressured Chinese president who is afraid to appear to be kowtowing to any trade demands from the U.S. for fear that his domestic rivals will denounce him as weak and that pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong will be emboldened by his weakness.

So each man is trying to intimidate the other into submission by showing who has the biggest tariff, and this is whipsawing markets and making it impossible for investors to plan long term.

We need a cease-fire now — and if no one else is going to propose the terms, I will.

President Trump should say to President Xi Jinping: “For the next six months, we’ll suspend all the tariffs that we’ve imposed. And in those six months we expect you to order from the top down an end to your worst trade abuses — and you know which ones we’re talking about: stealing intellectual property, forcing technology transfers, restricting access, etc. You don’t have to announce anything or put anything into law. Just get it done your own way and tell your people whatever you want. I won’t tweet a word to embarrass you. And we’ll re-evaluate in six months whether the results constitute meaningful progress.’’