Again, some of the continuing deterioration of trade accounts is owed to America's considerably faster growth in the last two quarters. But that also shows that U.S. trade policy is unable to plug the soaring leakages of the huge fiscal and monetary stimulation of domestic demand.

That must be infuriating to the president who stakes his credibility on keeping the promises made about major policy objectives. The entire external sector of the American economy is getting worse because China, the European Union and Japan seem unwilling to allow the U.S. to reduce its unsustainably large trade deficits in an orderly manner.

Those three economies account for nearly 75 percent of America's $810 billion deficit, but they are still accusing Washington of protectionism and destruction of the multilateral trading system.

That attitude is something one could expect from China, but not from presumably friendly allies like the European Union and Japan.

For China, at issue is 4.1 percent of its total demand and output — a share of exports to the U.S. in China's nominal GDP. Apart from that, there are structural problems requiring massive adjustments in China's manufacturing sectors that have been set up, with the help of U.S. investments and technology, as a world's export powerhouse.

Washington's trade and economic policy dialogue with China is also very difficult in an atmosphere of sensitive security considerations. China is a country that Washington defines as a "strategic competitor" and a "revisionist power" intent on changing the Western (i.e., American) world order.

At the same time, ongoing military confrontations about China's contested maritime borders, and Washington's diplomatic gestures toward Taiwan, perceived by Beijing as another challenge to its territorial integrity, are not an auspicious background for confident agreements on half-a-trillion-dollar trade issues.

Washington also made things difficult for itself by allowing the problem to slip into the meanders of contentious and slow-moving technical negotiations.