When we think of trade, we naturally think of the flow of goods. But when it comes to trade with China, we should instead be thinking about theft.

Indeed, that’s the title of Chapter 3 of Newt Gingrich’s 2019 book Trump vs. China — “Trade and Theft.” He’s referring to intellectual property theft, which China has used against the U.S. for decades with relative impunity. As Gingrich writes:

Intellectual property theft by China robs American inventors and companies of the incentive to innovate in the first place. According to the Global Innovation Policy Center, more than 45 million Americans work in IP-intensive industries. Intellectual property is worth $6.6 trillion to our economy and the economic impact from Innovation accounts for upward of 40% of our economic growth and employment. Make no mistake: When we talk about the theft of intellectual property, we mean the theft of American jobs.

Further, when we think of China, we should also think of murder. Because China has been literally murdering Americans by the bushel via its continuous shipment of deadly fentanyl to Mexico, which the drug cartels then disguise as other drugs and smuggle across our southern border, there to be ingested by unknowing Americans who end up dead.

Fentanyl killed more than 112,000 Americans in 2023, and China’s bloody paws are all over these crime scenes. Victor Davis Hanson gives us a sense of the enormity of this carnage: “The result over the last decade is more dead Americans from fentanyl than the total number of all U.S. soldiers lost in the wars of the twentieth century.”

Think about it: In the past 10 years, the duo of Communist China and the Mexican cartels have killed more Americans — a lot more Americans — than did the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan combined.

As Blackwater founder and geopolitical strategist Erik Prince told Tucker Carlson in a fascinating podcast last summer, “The fentanyl crisis … is funded, organized, logistically facilitated by the Chinese Communist Party. … Why would a drug dealer want to kill his customers? That’s what’s happening. And it is an absolute ‘F*** you’ from the CCP against the West for the Opium Wars of the 1840s.”

It’s against this grim backdrop, then, that we consider Donald Trump’s tariffs, which have been largely misunderstood as a tool for fixing trade imbalances. Considering them purely in this light shortchanges both the thinking of Trump and the versatility of tariffs for correcting all manner of bad behavior.

“Hysteria has erupted here and abroad,” writes the aforementioned VDH, “over President Trump’s threats to level trade tariffs against particular countries. Both American and foreign critics blasted them variously as either counterproductive and suicidal or unfair, imperialistic, and xenophobic.”

What they are, in fact, is America First.

Traditional free-traders hate tariffs, which they say merely prop up our own inefficient industries, protecting them from competition and forcing higher prices onto American consumers. Yet, as Hanson writes, “When Trump threatened to level tariffs against Mexico, Canada, Colombia, Venezuela, China, or the European Union, they were not primarily aimed at propping up particular inefficient U.S. industries at all.”

For example, as VDH notes, Trump hit Mexico with tariffs for three reasons: first, to stop the country’s continued complicity with China in the fentanyl crisis; second, to punish its refusal to stop the ruinous flow of more than 10 million illegals into our country across its northern border; and third, yes, to help correct a yawning trade deficit that now stands at $170 billion annually.

As for China, Hanson pulls no punches: “Its entire 20th-century ascendance was based on stealing U.S. technology, dumping its products on the U.S. market below the cost of production to capture market share, and forcing American corporations to relocate, offshore, and outsource — leaving our industrial hinterland a ‘rustbelt.’”

Trump’s tariffs are not a first resort; they’re a last resort because countries now routinely rely on our bumbling benevolence, on our willingness to just sit there and take it. Those days are over. As our Nate Jackson wrote recently, there’s a new tariff in town.

As VDH concludes, “The Trump tariffs are the last, desperate effort to reestablish global reciprocity and keep America safe.”