Invoking national security and the economic rivalry with China, the Trump administration is pursuing legally dubious interventions and control of private industry, with potentially high costs for US dynamism. Like the panic over Japan’s rise in the 1980s, the administration’s response is unwarranted and counterproductive.

STANFORD/LOS ANGELES – It is tempting to frame the Sino-American economic rivalry as a clash between engineering doers and lawyerly naysayers, as the Chinese-Canadian analyst Dan Wang does in his new book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. But this is a false dichotomy, because law is a crucial feature of US capitalism.