This is true, but the counterpoint is: America isn't going to pay very much for accidentally killing its last airliner manufacturer.

Airliners are a very mature market, with little incentive to innovate and minimal gains when you do. It's literally cheaper to operate 20 year old vehicles than replace them with the best available new ones! In how many other industries is that true?

And airliners are small: Airbus revenue is like $60B, Boeing (which also sees a lot of defense spending to pad the number) is $100B. No one else is even on the map. This is a tiny market, in a global sense. We're just stuck on the idea of it being important because of history: Airliners "feel like" a high tech growth industry of the future. They aren't. They're trains, basically.

The core devil's advocate position here is: so what? Boeing failed. Let them die (or rather, shrivel into the defense-only core of the company). Let the rest of the world fight over this tiny market with its shrinking margins. Nations that truly want to invent new things and grow in new ways[1] have better things to do and more important problems to worry about.

[1] Whether the USA still qualifies is sort of an open question, but for a different thread.