Trump’s team also wanted to put the brakes on China’s drive to establish itself as the world’s economic superpower. “China is basically trying to steal the future,” declared Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser, a year ago. But the new deal, while it includes some promises to protect intellectual property, leaves the core of China’s industrial strategy — what’s been called the “vast web of subsidies that has fueled the global rise of many Chinese companies” — untouched.

So why did Trump wimp out on trade?

At a broad level, the answer is that he was suffering from delusions of grandeur. America was never going to succeed in bullying a huge, proud nation whose economy is already, by some measures, larger than ours — especially while simultaneously alienating other advanced economies that might have joined us in pressuring China to change some of its economic policies.

At a more granular level, none of the pieces of Trump trade strategy have worked as promised.

Although Trump has repeatedly insisted that China is paying his tariffs, the facts say otherwise: Chinese export prices haven’t gone down, which means that the tariffs are falling on U.S. consumers and companies. And the bite on consumers would have gone up substantially if Trump hadn’t called off the round of further tariff increases that had been scheduled for this past Sunday.

At the same time, Chinese retaliation has hit some U.S. exporters, farmers in particular, hard. And while Trump may quietly hold farm exports in contempt, he needs those rural votes — votes that were being put at risk despite a farm bailout that has already cost more than twice as much as Barack Obama’s bailout of the auto industry.

Finally, uncertainty over tariff policy was clearly hurting manufacturing and business investment, even as overall economic growth remained solid.

So Trump, as I said, basically declared victory and retreated.

Will Trump’s trade defeat hurt him politically? Probably not. Many Americans will surely buy the spin, and the trade war was never popular anyway.

Furthermore, voting mostly reflects the economy’s direction, not its level — not whether things are good, but whether they’ve been getting better recently. It may actually be good political strategy to do stupid things for a while, then stop doing them around a year before the election, which is a fair summary of Trump’s trade actions.