A little curiosity about China would have gone a long way, since the Communist Party is not shy about declaring its commitment to domination in general and exploitation of technology in particular. Of course, any American who pays attention and questions the Communist line is accused by the party of having a “Cold War mentality” — but this very accusation relies on forgetfulness and incuriosity among its intended audience.

Since 1971, the American elite’s Cold War attitude toward China’s leaders has been one of warm indulgence. In the 1970s and 1980s, that meant supporting China against a greater adversary, the Soviet Union. What is extremely strange is that this policy of indulgence continued and even deepened after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

A few years after the Cold War ended, American leaders started treating China the way they had treated West Germany and Japan. We tolerated punishing trade deficits in the 1970s and 1980s to support those two allies, and we had strategic reasons to do it. As for building up China in the 1990s and 2000s, America’s generosity was supposed to somehow lead to China’s liberalization. In reality, it led to the transfer of our industrial base to a foreign rival.

In this sense, a zombie “Cold War mentality” never went away — though it certainly stopped making sense. Only recently, with help from Mr. Xi’s decision last year to, in effect, declare himself potential leader for life, has Donald Trump become the first president since Richard Nixon to pay attention and run a reality check on China.

Silicon Valley is not alone in its inattention to geopolitical reality; some on Wall Street have been eager to make excuses for Google’s naïveté . The timing is not coincidental; just this week American officials met their Chinese counterparts in Shanghai to negotiate a trade deal.

The flip side of China’s huge trade surplus has been America’s huge current account deficit. All of the dollars we send abroad that never get used to buy American goods have to go somewhere, and most go through New York’s money center banks on their way to buying financial assets. Since upsetting this imbalance is a threat to profits, Wall Street would prefer to cave on trade and keep Google’s stock price high while they’re at it.

But the banks’ experience of the last few decades of globalization has not been representative. The trade deficits that brought flows of money to Wall Street took jobs and bargaining power away from the median worker.