Last Friday , the White House raised the tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports up to 25 percent. On Monday, China retaliated with tariffs of its own. The trade war is now full-on — except that it’s not really about trade.

China does account for the largest share of America’s trade deficit. But many experts don’t seem to think that bilateral trade deficits are a problem in themselves — they’re just a symptom of other issues (if even that). “The overall United States global trade imbalance is the result of economic conditions in the United States — the excess of investment over savings,” Martin Feldstein, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has argued, adding that if America’s trade imbalance with China were eliminated, it would simply shift to other countries.

Whether President Trump is misguided in doggedly pursuing tariffs or playing coy and using them as leverage with the Chinese government, America’s continued drive to levy penalties is less about fixing a trade problem than about changing China’s investment rules. In particular, the Trump administration perceives those rules as forcing the transfer of foreign technology to Chinese companies, unfairly helping them.

But even American negotiators who parse the trade versus tech issue this clearly tend to overlook an essential fact: The international trade and financial system that was set up after World War II — with the creation of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and, much later, the World Trade Organization (all nurtured and dominated by the United States) — actively encouraged “technological spillovers” from developed economies to developing ones. Under the W.T.O.’s agreements on intellectual property, developed countries are under “the obligation” to provide incentives to their companies to transfer technology to less developed countries.