Last week, the White House announced plans to levy tariffs on up to $60 billion of Chinese imports. The primary, and legal, rationale hinges on the little-used Section 301 of a 1974 trade law that permits retaliation against countries that infringe US intellectual-property rights. Determined to halt what it perceives as a steady decline relative to an emergent China, the Trump administration and not a few voices in Congress are embracing a tough-on-China approach that they believe will at long last reassert American primacy. It will not; the strategy and the tactics of this trade war are a classic case of fighting not just the last war but fighting it on the adversary’s terrain.

WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is head of Global Strategies Envestnet and the president of River Twice Research.

To be fair, the Chinese government quickly promised to re-evaluate some of its trade practices and to crack down on Chinese companies that demand intellectual-property transfers as a condition for US and foreign companies doing business in China. That raises at least the possibility---as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin suggested in subsequent interviews---that the Trump administration will refrain from imposing tariffs and succeed in using the threat as a cudgel to bring China to the negotiating table.

Still, given that these announced tariffs echo plans for duties on steel and aluminum imports as well as Trump’s longstanding position that the US is losing on trade, it’s clear that the White House is itching to reject decades of trade consensus in favor of a more nationalist approach.

There’s little question that China, having long demanded the transfer of intellectual property as a condition for many companies doing business in the Middle Kingdom, has played fast and loose with intellectual property laws and made good use of the coerced knowledge transfer. A set of very public and punitive tariffs, however, will not reverse what has already been transferred and will not do much to address the challenge of China today, which is no longer a manufacturing neophyte. The blueprints for the Nike shoes of 2010, the flow-charts for just-in-time manufacturing, the IP for robots, and the software for inventory controls cannot be uncopied. Tariffs might punish China for what it did, but America will not be enriched by them. American prosperity depends on what we will make in the future, not on what we made in the past.

That’s certainly where China is focusing, on the future. China is no longer the economic equivalent of a high-school student consuming knowledge and copying best-in-breed techniques. China is becoming an innovation powerhouse in its own right, designing and making everything from sophisticated drones (DJI now controls about 75 percent of the $15 billion commercial drone market) to advanced artificial intelligence systems to an ecosystem of mobile payments and processing (dominated by Alibaba subsidiary Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay) far ahead of any US digital banking or payment infrastructure. As a result, slapping on punitive tariffs designed to retaliate for intellectual property infringements is largely anachronistic.

This is not just a Trump issue. The presumption that more rigorous intellectual property protections will “level the playing field” needs to be challenged. As any tech executive will attest, no company can thrive on its past IP for very long. Qualcomm, for instance, was once considered unassailable because of its wealth of patents for wireless communication. But it has proved very assailable, and would have been bought by up-and-coming rival Broadcom had the White House not intervened. A new program, a better design innovation can give a company a few years head start over competitors, but unless it zealously and aggressively spends on the next new thing, others will soon develop their own variants at lower costs and higher efficiency.

The idea, then, that China is succeeding because it has stolen US intellectual property misreads what is happening. Yes, China certainly took advantage of past knowledge transfers, but it is doing much more than copying.