The reason there is an expectation that trade equalises over the long term is that any nation having a trade deficit over the long term implies that it is accumulating debt and living beyond its means- buying more than it is earning- this has obvious logic to it and would appear unsustainable but in the unique case of the US its USD reserve currency status has enabled it to be an exception, at least for the last 50 years- however the logic does ultimately also apply to the USD and USD as when and if the viability of the USD to remain the global reserve currency is seen to become questionable then a crunch point comes and you hit a wall of debt and an inability to sustainit- this is ussually called insolvency. This is the current status of the USD and its sponsor, the USA. China has developed mBridge trade payments protocol initially under the auspices of the BIS. It enables trade payments between China and trade partners using CBDCs compatible with Chinas already operational CBDC Yuan. Lately Saudi Arabia joined both mBridge and BRICS and following that BIS abdicated its involvement with mBridge. mBridge creates an alternative to SWIFT. A protocol engineered by China and requiring trade partners to implement CBDCs compatible with the protocol. China has already long enabled shadow banking trade payments outside of SWIFT to nations like N.Korea, Iran and more recently Russia...who were all sanctioned from SWIFT payments to a greater or lesser degree. China is reverse engineering the wests banking network and its global trade payments hegemony...via Hong Kong and CBDCs The petrodollar was founded upon the agreement of Saudi Arabia to denominate oil trade in USD and to have preferential access to the USTs. The end of the endless spigot of fiat debt funding USA and its decades long habit of living beyond its means has arrived. The USA must now enact radical austerity measures similar to those often imposed by the IMF on developing nations, or face insolvency. Trump has opted for tariffs- they are a crude but 'easy quick fix' option relative to actually rebuilding a viable and truly efficient productive economy capable of outperforming what China has constructed... The tariffs can be expected to provide more than adequate short term income to service existing debt and enable the roll over of existing debt as 7-8 Trillion needs to be rolled over this year. Longer term they signal the US era of empire is probably over.