A cargo chip (L) arrives into the Port of Los Angeles, the busiest container port in the U.S., after departing from the Port of Yantian, China, on November 7, 2019 in San Pedro, California. Mario Tama | Getty Images

President Trump announced a month ago that his administration had clinched a trade deal with China. Well, actually, the first in a series of deals, which the White House now refers to as "phase one." Since then, countless declarations of "winning," but agreeing to a deal only "if the terms are right," have added to the year and half long conflicting cacophony of rhetoric about the content of any trade agreement with China. Bottom line? The constant bluster has blurred the reality of what a deal would even accomplish, if anything at all. The only way to shovel away the pile of broken promises and contradictory comments is to analyze the flow of maritime trade. Why? With 90% of all items in a house transported over water, it is the purest form of showing supply and demand. The flow of trade is agnostic. It moves regardless of who is "winning" or "losing."

​The impact of this trade war and the opportunities lost by American businesses both large and small can not only be tracked by the public earnings reports, but through American exports. And a deal, no matter what is agreed on, would never make up for the losses sustained during this trade war, according to calculations based on the decrease in volumes of containers, cargo and tankers that traveled into U.S. ports.

Dropping export volume

For a perspective on the losses, look no further than the Port of Los Angeles, the largest port in the country. U.S. exports to China from the bustling harbor decreased for 12 consecutive months. It suffered a 19.1% drop in export volume when comparing October 2019 with the same month in 2018. China's retaliatory tariffs hit 96.6% of the purchases of U.S. exports that traveled through the L.A. port complex, with a price tag of $19.9 billion. Add on the additional retaliatory tariffs from the other countries the U.S. is sparring with on trade, and that brings the total of impacted export cargo to $20.2 billion, or 28.8% of all export value through the L.A. port system. Considering 95% of the world's consumers are outside of the U.S., the tariffs imposed on American goods have priced them out of the global marketplace.