It would also not hurt to stop with the constant demonization of "China" as a whole, which just serves to downplay criticism as bigotry.
That would definitely be an interesting experiment. I suspect prices would rise slightly and we'd find out just how dependent we really are.
After a week or two there would be a joint statement of the leaders of the Western World that they have unanimously decided to support the Chinese action, in fact they'll come to help to cart rubble personally.
I could certainly see leaders in certain countries such as France who have been actively selling weaponry to China going "to help cart the rubble personally" but there's no way Obama or his next successor would do that.
Yes, we are utterly co-dependent at this point in time.
Cutting trade with China would take a decade or more if it can be done at all at this stage.
But I could finally buy decent pliers made in the USA, like I once could 25 years ago.
This belief is clearly a failure of imagination.
Why not? Prices would rise marginally if at all. There'd be some supply issues for a while.
It was ok to sanction Iran, Iraq and South Africa and so on but not now in this globalised world? We put up with any old abuse from Israel and China because they're approved in some way?
I'm no diplomat, but there should be some consequences of significance.
It would harm the bottom 50% in the US the most. That's enough reason to look at other options first.
There'd be a diplomatic tit-for-tat leading up to sanctions, they wouldn't just be turned on at 00:00 tomorrow. So there'd be perhaps a year. Sanctions tend to start with specific items and scale up. So it's a process, with a timeline, over perhaps 2 - 10 years.
Plenty of time for significnt amounts of trade to move to india, Vietnam and the other developing economies.