Read: China has more leverage than you think in the trade war

The administration’s trade-focused plan for dealing with China has always seemed small-scale, given the amped-up rhetoric Trump’s advisers and allies use in public. China has committed “economic aggression.” It’s “the most predatory economic government,” and it has made war on American workers for 20 years. Even Trump’s trade negotiator thinks the idea that trade talks will fix these problems is a little far-fetched. “I am not foolish enough to think that there is going to be one negotiation that is going to change all of the practices of China or our relationship with them,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer testified to the House in February. (Lighthizer’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story; a White House official declined to comment on the record.)

What happens when tariffs don’t do the trick? It’s hard to say. If the administration has a Plan B for a new trade strategy—one in which the tariffs go away without Chinese action—it won’t say so. “There’s no time limit. There’s no timeline. The way this works is the tariffs are in place until the president decides the tariffs go out of place,” Lighthizer told NPR at the outset of the talks.

Lighthizer has maintained that the tariffs are entirely separate from national-security actions against Huawei, such as charges against the company’s CFO. But The Washington Post reports that White House officials decided to issue an executive order last week clearing the way for action against Huawei after China balked at what Lighthizer and his partner negotiator, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, were asking. Based on that order, the Commerce Department is developing rules that will require American companies to register with the government before doing business with Huawei. That could include companies like Google, which reportedly cut Huawei off from some Android services on Sunday. Huawei spent $11 billion with American suppliers last year, a not-insignificant chunk of the overall $737 billion in annual bilateral trade.

The further the administration goes, the less the dispute falls into the neat policy toolbox and the more it seems like a wholesale push to contain China. “There are many reasons why the United States is not off the mark in terms of going after Huawei,” Elizabeth Economy, a China watcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, said on a call with reporters Thursday. “But I think this last step does speak very directly to the Chinese, sort of the U.S. is trying to contain our growth and our rise as an economic superpower. I think it takes it a little bit over the line.”

Read: Tariffs drive farm income down and equipment prices up

Ask economists what they fear, and the response will likely start with the dreaded D-word: decoupling. The U.S. and China could forcibly unravel their closely intertwined economies. “You’ve already seen an increasing amount of that, whether it’s various chips that people are trying to source elsewhere, [or] whether it’s Foxconn going to India,” says Christopher Balding, an associate economics professor at Fulbright University Vietnam. (Huawei claims it already has plans to build chips elsewhere. On the other end of the trade war, Apple supplier Foxconn is looking to India for new factories.)