DECOUPLING: What’s the Real Story on Trump’s ‘Deal’ with China?

Remember four years ago, during what they named “the supply chain crisis,” when Chairman Xi Jinping kept shutting down whole cities for a month at a time, allegedly due to COVID-19 outbreaks? Huge manufacturing centers like Shanghai and Shenzhen, Wuhan and Chengdu were locked down, with manufacturing and shipping banned, in some cases multiple times.

Because of those distant lockdowns, our American automakers were shut down, too — not of their own choice, but because a vehicle that’s 95% finished still can’t roll off the lot if it’s waiting for a dashboard, or a starter, or a printed circuit board to be shipped from a city that’s been frozen by a distant dictator.

People started to realize then that it wasn’t just American retailers that are too dependent on China; it’s American manufacturers as well. But the Biden-Harris regime tamped down such talk and blamed the containership lines or the seaports, saying the problem was unorganized transportation. The political party that had long been bankrolled by Chinese interests could never allow the message to stand that America is dangerously addicted to Chinese components.

That mistake won’t happen this time. The Trump-Vance administration is making sure Americans understand that our industrial dependence on China isn’t healthy. It may have taken a month of 145% punitive tariffs to drive home the point, but now it’s undeniable.

What if it weren’t a tariff that we could just turn on and off at will? What if the holdup were a Chinese blockade, or another series of Chinese urban lockdowns? Or the worst of all: What if the holdup were a shooting war?

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