Why would anybody need to build a city of 60,000 engineers to compete in 5G? Europe's leading 5G makers are not doing that so that they can compete with Huawei, because it's obviously entirely unnecessary.

The US doesn't need to change anything to compete with China. It has been successfully out-competing China in nearly every field for decades, save for low value manufacturing. China poses no greater competitive threat in the middle and upper tiers of economic competition than Western Europe does (presently far less in fact). The US also didn't need to entirely alter itself to compete with Western Europe.

> the US has to finally confront the structural reasons why they have become so uncompetitive in electronic hardware in relation to East Asia

No it doesn't need to do that at all. The US leads the world by a large margin when it comes to the semiconductor industry - the most important components of electronics today. Manufacturing electronic hardware is a low value economic segment, which is why it's outsourced. It can be pushed from China to a dozen other countries instead (see Foxconn's statement that they're prepared to move Apple's manufacturing out of China any time, that's how weak China's value proposition really is). Samsung - the world's leading phone maker - has already done that, moving a lot of their phone manufacturing to Vietnam.