Don't you think that's a very easy question to answer?
A ton of money, an amount of money serious enough even for America to be made concerned.
Pretty much everybody with stock market exposure, including pretty much anybody in USA who counts as an elite, will loose big time if one day Beijing presses the Delete button, and half of Fortune 500 vanishes.
Remember, it was Apple out of everybody who was granted an exemption from punitive tariffs on China.
And, yes, those decisions were influenced by money but they were also influenced heavily by American Exceptionalist arrogance. Of course our culture will dominate theirs and they'll take their rightful, subservient place to us in the global order.
Never mind that they literally converted their own conquerers to Chinese culture TWICE (mongols/yuan, manchu/qing) in the last millenium.
I mean they would prohibit all vital operations of these companies in China. What would Apple do if China will give them a Huawei treatment?
They wouldn't even be able to move away from China, if their Chinese suppliers would be told to cease doing business with Apple globally.
Pretty much every globally prominent company dealing with light industries, manufacturing, electronics has some things in their products which they cannot reasonably expect to get elsewhere but in/from China.
Second to that: check what you saw in the previous half of the year. A lot of living essentials are made almost solely in China. Would US elites be ready to deal with angry unwashed masses who, with some help, and incitement, would go torch their houses because they can't get not only their new Iphone, but basic medicines, clothing, car parts, basic household goods, widgets for their businesses, and such?
Unless Americans are ready for that, they can't fight China, and the people in Beijing know it very well.
I don't think it'd play out like that. It's been a few generations, but Americans have experience with wartime rationing that was far more extreme. They didn't riot and demand a peace treaty with Hilter and Tojo, so they could could get the consumer goods they had been used to having.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States
https://www.history.com/news/food-rationing-in-wartime-ameri...
But, I don't see any US president standing for it before the election, or at least attempting to sell it to his electorate/funders, unless pretty much a hot war is happening.
USA was the biggest industrial power by late thirties, and I think no country would've stood for Germany in the open on the global arena by then. The situation is more than a bit different now.
Be hopeful that the politicians will be as logical as you are.
I don't think it would be a hard to sell the American public on some kind of rationing if Beijing suddenly embargoes the US in a way that necessitated it. Given the economic dependencies that you cite, I think a US-initiated decoupling would likely proceed slowly enough to not cause critical disruption, just higher prices.
Well, all those people would instantly be out of a job for one. What Huawei factories in the US are being shut down? It's one thing to lose market access, it's another to lose jobs.
> Pretty much every globally prominent company dealing with light industries, manufacturing, electronics has some things in their products which they cannot reasonably expect to get elsewhere but in/from China.
Cheap is a better word here. There is not a single item in China that can't be replicated elsewhere in the world for consumer products.
> A lot of living essentials are made almost solely in China.
Because of cheapness, not because they can't be created elsewhere. Many countries can create these goods, including the U.S.
> Unless Americans are ready for that, they can't fight China, and the people in Beijing know it very well.
Americans might not be "ready" but they can definitely decouple with China if push comes to shove.
> We estimate China only makes $8.46 from an iPhone
> No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree
It should also be noted that there were plenty of experts who would tell you that the world is now too economically intertwined to be able to support any major war between major powers... in 1914. Economic integration preventing global conflict has been disproven time and again in history.
> [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree
It's worth noting that most of the wiki article is basically a list of counter-examples that proved that statement false. There have been a half-dozen wars between McDonald's-havers.
Sell to another country at lower prices, and less profit than the can get from the US?
If the dreams of people like Elon Musk come true, USSF may end up being a far more important organisation than AFSC ever was.
Guess which age group has an outsize influence on Reddit?
But he wasn't openly in league with hostile powers, wasn't blatantly corrupt, and didn't utterly meltdown when faced with a crisis. Arguably, this is because Chaney and other Neo-Cons were calling the shots, but things seemed mostly stable.
Trump is all of those negatives but without the veneer of good faith and competency.
Trump isn't going to be rehabilitated like Bush. Politics aside, George Bush seems like a genuinely decent guy at a personal level. Trump, on the other hand, is a nasty, selfish bully; he always has been one, and he always will be one. As long as he remains alive, he will constantly remind America if his nature.
> Imagine if he's celebrated as the politician who finally acted on principal in a time when the rest of Washington was looking the other way because of cheap manufacturing.
Trump won't be celebrated, since there's no strategy behind what he does: it's all short term self-interest. Bolton says he begged Xi in person to buy US farm products to help with his re-election (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53086042) and approved of the concentration camps that are being sanctioned here (https://www.axios.com/trump-uighur-muslim-bolton-73ebf1e2-9d...).
If anything, Trump's bumbling, impulsive actions caused aspects of an already solidifying consensus on China to firm up a little quicker.
Imagine if he's celebrated as the politician who finally acted on principal in a time when the rest of Washington was looking the other way because of cheap manufacturing. Hollywood was tailoring their products to appease the Chinese government and be allowed in the market, anyone who wanted to do business there like NBA owners and players were biting their tongues and hiding their political opinions. But not Trump, he turned the tide and made America care about human freedom again.
Ok, fine, crazy thought. But it raises the question, why aren't any of our other leaders even pretending to try and be that person?