Foreign trade negotiators have been flummoxed by the White House strategy and occasional mixed messages coming from Trump and his top lieutenants. At times, U.S. officials appeared focused on pushing back on foreign tariffs, leading their foreign counterparts to wonder whether they could avoid U.S. tariffs by cutting their own, a development that would lead to more free trade, not less of it.

But at other moments, U.S. leaders appeared more focused on fundamentally reshaping global trade and the U.S. economy by breaking the generations-long U.S. dependence on imports. If that is the strategy, no amount of negotiation from other nations can shift tariffs, the diplomat said.

This is what’s been driving my feeling that we’re in for a doozy and why I’m not really buying the arguments that Trump has a master plan to use the dollar to snap the reigns on a world that’s been trying to buck the US’s control. They ran a vibes-based campaign on the white middle class’s vague awareness of their eroding position, articulated through a crude losing/winning binary, and now they’re trying to “win” but Trump has no clue what that even looks like. You can’t negotiate with someone who can’t define what they want. You can’t even capitulate to it. The pain will continue until someone comes up with a clever way to satisfy Trump’s ego and make him look like a tough guy in front of his voters and until then it’s anyone’s guess.