Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

So what you want is extortion, not trade. It's a worldwide version of the mafia.

Maybe we should just lay down and let the world do whatever they want. I would hate to be accused of negotiating from a position of power.

Chest thumping false bravado will mislead you every time.

If I go to a restaurant, wait an hour for a table, get very hungry, and then see on the menu that the restaurant has tripled prices, is the restaurant "negotiating from a position of power" ? Sure, once.

What exactly do you think happens to our power after Trump squanders it to extract one-time concessions that mostly flow into his own pockets?

The entire post-WWII world order was deliberately designed by clever Americans who knew how to use the situation to its full advantage. Enshrining the USD as the world's reserve currency, a network of military bases around the world to protect trade lanes, a combination of propaganda and economic incentive to bring the best and brightest to work in the US, while deliberately transforming the economy from a manufacturing economy to a service and finance economy, always putting itself in a position to be able to extract rent from everyone else.

The last vestiges of this world order was the TPP. The US negotiated a trade deal that would cement its top position in the Pacific region, while curbing China's growing economy and influence.

And then Trump axed it, because he didn't understand it.

China understood perfectly what an opportunity that was for them, and they have been quietly become less and less reliant on trade with the US since.

The current US regime is now hell-bent on dismantling the remaining alliances, relationships, and trade agreements that actually kept the US on top, the ones that actually kept the US powerful.

...while baselessly claiming that the existing world order was somehow "unfair" or "a bad deal", and that whatever the hell they're doing now is restoring some kind of lost power. They clearly have no clue what the source of America's power really is.

And here you are repeating their talking points.

What do you mean, exactly, when you're saying that the US shouldn't "let the world do whatever they want" ? What specific trade policies do you think are unfavourable to the US?

Yes, Trump is destroying it. But this order was crumbling already. The reason is that the "smart" people from the past believed they could always count on being the middlemen of the world. They believed that other countries would always be happy to send their best people and products to the US so that American companies would trade their branded versions around the world for a high markup. The reality is that other countries slowly understood that they had everything they needed to start trading among themselves without the need of a middleman. And once this realization sinks in it is difficult to go back to the status quo of depending on a single country.