The past year has seen America’s industrial and consumer supply chains threatened by two critical events: the rise of Huawei as a Chinese state-backed telecoms giant, and the outbreak of the coronavirus (also originating in China). These two threats have laid bare the unsettling fact that the American economy has become so heavily globalized that we are unable to ensure consistent and safe supply of everything from pharmaceuticals to consumer electronics.
For decades Americans have enjoyed access to cheap goods, due in large part to the fact that we’ve outsourced our industrial and supply capacity to cheap, overseas markets like China and Vietnam. The free traders, roosting in their D.C. think tanks and on Wall Street, worry that the U.S.-China trade war is uprooting our supply chains and that Huawei (shown to have deep connections to the Chinese intelligence apparatus) is only a theoretical threat. They tell us that we must come to terms with China’s rise, that there is no other way. But what if there was?
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