The Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity has this fabulous paper Ignore the Trade Balance: Concentrate on Full Employment.

Do not attempt to discuss this unless and until you read, understand, and accept the limitations expressed in the words in the excerpts below that I have chosen to emphasize.

Monetary sovereignty involves having your own currency and central bank, not being on a gold standard, not being on any kind of fixed exchange rate system, and not having significant foreign currency debt. Under these circumstances, it is no longer clear that a current account surplus is beneficial and a deficit costly, and indeed, the opposite may be true, however provocative though the claim may appear.
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The currency in which a country accumulates net foreign liabilities over time is of vital importance. If public and private foreign debt is denominated in foreign currency, this creates the risk of national insolvency and a costly financial crisis. It also implies that the government of that country does not enjoy full monetary sovereignty, especially if the foreign currency debt is public debt, or effectively guaranteed by the public sector.

If the rest of the world has chosen to net save in the currency of a country, however, it is not clear that the resulting net foreign liabilities are a debt which needs to be repaid using real resources at all. This is at most potentially the case. The accumulation of domestic currency financial assets by the foreign sector is a portfolio decision of the foreign sector , and not something that the government can control precisely, or arguably should seek to control, except in so far as speculative c apital flows are viewed as destabilising to financial markets.

For those of us who understand the accounting identity that underlies Modern Money Theory, this result should be no surprise. However, for those of us who did not go through the process of figuring out MMT’s implications on trade balances, this is a particularly nice result to read about.

You won’t find an inkling of this logical conclusion in any of the standard wisdom about trade policy. You certainly won’t find it in the idiotic ideas of Trump or Obama or Clinton. Here they are negotiating trade deals without a clue as to the consequences of whatever agreement they are trying to get.