Often in history, there’s no blow struck by the enemies of a great power more fatal than the one it inflicts on itself. The British invasion of Egypt in 1956, for example, and the ensuing pushback, walkback, humiliation, and loss of prestige for the country, came to be viewed as the own goal that firmly ended the United Kingdom’s claim to being a global empire.

Donald Trump’s sudden declaration of, and subsequent quick retreat from, trade war on China may end up being remembered the same way: an unforced error cementing the decline of a unipolar world order dominated by one single power and signaling the transition to something new.

The Trump administration’s stated goals of reshoring the jobs that years of pro-corporate free trade deals had sent out of the country and reconstituting the US manufacturing base are good and arguably necessary. After all, it was only a few years ago that the United States had to rely on airlifts of vital medical supplies from its leading rival to grapple with a pandemic.

But the specific way Trump has rolled out the tariffs, and the decision to turn that project into one big pissing contest for global supremacy, has potentially done the exact kind of damage to global perceptions of US power that the president was trying to avoid.

To the extent that the Trump administration had a coherent set of goals in its ever-shifting public justifications for its tariffs, they were meant to not just kick-start the process of bringing manufacturing back to the United States but to force countries into renegotiating their terms of trade in a way that was more favorable to the United States and, more broadly, to isolate and put pressure on a rising China vying for global leadership. That last one was reportedly what Trump officials had been discussing two weeks into the tariff announcement, reasoning that most of the world’s countries, China included, would face such an economic shock from losing the ability to sell their exports to the United States’ sizable population of big-spending consumers, they would simply fold and agree to whatever Trump wanted.

So far, none of that has worked out.

The blanket, erratic, and often nonsensical nature of the tariffs has, far from showing signs of jump-starting the long process of reshoring manufacturing jobs, actually proven a major obstacle to that project, while also leading manufacturers to shed jobs or scale back their plans and plunging the entire US economy into uncertainty more broadly. This reached a crescendo with the mass sell-off of US Treasury bonds earlier this month that briefly threatened to send the entire US financial system buckling.

The promised renegotiated trade deals, which Trump had first insisted weren’t the goal of the tariffs before turning around and claiming they were, haven’t materialized either. After three weeks, the United States still hasn’t signed a single one of the “ninety deals in ninety days” his trade advisor promised, with other countries’ baffled officials unable to be sure Trump will stick to anything they sign, and who have sometimes found in negotiations that US officials don’t even seem to know what they actually want.

But it’s on the last goal, of squeezing China, that the tariff rollout has been most damaging, at least on the symbolic level of perceptions of US power.

After initiating the standoff publicly and engaging in public bluster — that “China needs to make a deal with us” but that “we don’t have to make a deal with them,” in Trump’s words, while his officials maintained the president “has a spine of steel, and he will not break” — and insisting Chinese premier Xi Jinping would have to request a call with him, Trump has since had to retreat.

Trump has more quietly sent Beijing unrequited suggestions that Xi call the White House, while issuing exemption after exemption to his tariffs, now finally conceding they would eventually come down “substantially,” even publicly claiming progress on trade talks that both Chinese officials and his own Treasury secretary say aren’t happening.

Trump is now being widely pilloried in the domestic press as having lost the game of chicken he chose to start — and not just by progressive media.

“China called Mr. Trump’s bluff and seems to have won this round,” the right-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote on April 23, describing the “harsh reality” of the situation. Other business and right-leaning outlets have similarly flatly described Trump as having “blinked” in the standoff.

It’s easy to see why he did. While the tariffs have caused economic pain in China, it has not been nearly on the scale of the chaos Americans are suffering through.

While the International Monetary Fund has downgraded growth projections for both, it’s the United States that has taken the bigger hit. US growth this year (1.8 percent) is still expected to be less than half of that of China’s (4 percent). The predictions of a US recession are now widespread. Trump has also faced a parade of CEOs, donors, or both complaining about the tariffs’ impact on their bottom lines, a problem Xi Jinping doesn’t have in the authoritarian Chinese system.

Reportedly, though, the real trigger was China’s retaliatory restriction on exports of rare earths, the metals and other minerals that are vital components of the supply chains of countless products vital for manufacturing. In the end, it seems, Trump mostly succeeded at demonstrating in the most public way possible that the United States, for the moment, needs China’s exports a lot more than China needs the massive US consumer market.

Nor has the goal of peeling the rest of the world away from China succeeded. Not only did Beijing promptly go and sign deals with Vietnam, a pivotal mutual trade partner caught in the middle, but even close US allies are refusing to pick sides.

The European Union is in talks to end sanctions on Chinese officials and end tariffs on China’s electric cars — part of what an EU official has called “an outstretched hand” from Brussels as it moves “in a more balanced way” after years of following Washington in a more anti-China direction — while Japan, unwilling to damage its economy, has openly rejected the idea of curbing its trade with the country, undercutting the administration’s apparent plan to negotiate a series of individual trade deals with allies before “approach[ing] China as a group.” This is particularly deflating, as the White House has also failed to strike a deal with Japan that it hoped would be the first domino to fall.

Trump, in other words, has not just inadvertently demonstrated the extent of the United States’s dependence on China. He has also wound up demonstrating other key nations’ similar dependence, while revealing stark limits to Washington’s ability to make even its allies do what it wants.

None of this had to happen. Trump could have taken a more strategic, balanced, and targeted approach to the tariffs that would have helped inch the United States closer to his ostensible goals without causing havoc at home, alienating the entire world, and trapping himself into an embarrassing climbdown.

What would that have looked like? It would have required careful diplomacy with US allies and countries caught in the middle, to deepen relations, maybe even move toward favorable trade agreements with them, in the process weaning the United States off dependence on China while helping peel those countries away from it — not insulting and trying to push them around.

It would have meant targeted tariffs on only certain Chinese exports, combined with large-scale government investment in US industries of the kind that got bipartisan support under Joe Biden, and policies to attract the workers these industries need, all of which would have bought time for the United States to make this transition  — not immediate, blanket tariffs on everything China sells to Americans, the dismantling of Biden’s industrial investments, and immigration policies that are scaring the entire world from traveling to, let alone settling in, the United States.

And at its heart, it would have meant abandoning the policy of US primacy and all the elite cultural pathologies that come with it, which have proven so disastrous to ordinary Americans, not to mention the many millions of foreigners impacted. That would have meant treating the revival of US manufacturing and the improvement of US workers’ lives as a good and an end in itself, not as a chess move tied to winning a largely symbolic global tug of war — a war that only endangers Americans and, now, threatens to make them poorer.

Ironically, a more prosperous and well-liked United States with a functioning welfare state and a happy, optimistic population would be better positioned to “win the future” against a country like China anyway, which is certainly a goal of Trump’s. Instead, resorting to threats, bluster, and other heavy-handed measures has ended up painting Trump into an awkward corner that has severely dented the perception of US power on the world stage. Trump could well end up like the man who so tightly clung to what he cherished most, it broke to pieces in his hands.