Why would I as a non-American want to buy a US made iPhone over a China made iPhone?

And don't say quality, the Chinese will manufacture exactly what you pay them to manufacture. It's not their fault that 90% of their customers pay them to make cheap shit.

If anything I'd trust (for now) the quality more with the Chinese as they've been building iPhones for 10 years, have experience, have their quality control improved year by year etc. No newcomer won't be as good from day 1

Article says "other Southeast Asian countries" though.

As long as those are countries that the US wouldn't eventually end up having a 4x trade deficit with, it should still be a good tradeoff for the US. That's a reasonable expectation since barriers for US companies to operate in those countries are lower than in China.

FYI 'those countries' mentioned in the article already have a big trade deficit, even bigger than 4x.

Source: (e.g. Vietnam/US) https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5520.html

And I can't see those SEA countries importing anything from the US soon. The demand isn't really there.