Remember the Vietnam quagmire? (Actually, I hope many of my readers are young enough that they don’t, but you’ve presumably heard about it.) In political discourse, “quagmire” has come to have a quite specific meaning. It’s what happens when a government has committed itself to a policy that isn’t working, but can’t bring itself to admit failure and cut its losses. So it just keeps escalating, and things keep getting worse.

Well, here’s my thought: Trump’s trade war is looking more and more like a classic policy quagmire. It’s not working — that is, it isn’t at all delivering the results Trump wants. But he’s even less willing than the average politician to admit to a mistake, so he keeps doing even more of what’s not working. And if you extrapolate based on that insight, the implications for the U.S. and world economies are starting to get pretty scary.

This article, by the way, while not very technical, is going to make use of a number of charts and even a few terms of art, hence the “wonkish” warning.

To preview, I’m going to make five points:

1. The trade war is getting big. Tariffs on Chinese goods are back to levels we associate with pre-1930s protectionism. And the trade war is reaching the point where it becomes a significant drag on the U.S. economy.