No Trade War with China, Please

There's something deeply nostalgic about watching a U.S. Treasury Secretary fly to Asia to press a nation that is running a massive trade surplus with the U.S. to revalue its currencyand then come home with nothing to show for his trip but soothing waffle. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the target of U.S. ire was Japan; now it's China, from which Treasury Secretary John Snow has just returned with assurances that the Chinese will soon show "flexibility" in their currency policies. For a while, trade tensions with Japan were a focus of U.S. domestic politics and threatened to damage...