The US is a massive importer and exporter but as a percentage of the US economy it’s relatively small compared to export lead economies like China, Japan, Europe etc. It’s not that being globally competitive isn’t an issue, it’s just not an immediate existential issue for America. Especially as we continue to have the biggest most productive contiguous agricultural region in the world with the cheapest transport and no major security concerns; close to the cheapest oil and nat gas which has lead to the cheapest global production of many industrial inputs. Combined with the global baby bust leading to record rapidly aging population means that the US is on top for some time.
Biggest sure, but the most productive is in the Netherlands. And y'all produce huge useless quantities of corn that are killing your population.
That both depends on how immediate "immediate" is and how the US will react. When CPU/GPUs have nothing made or designed in the US in them any more and the Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Amazons of the world are all non-US and the US is no longer in the top of military and GDP then the US will no longer be in a position to lead anyone anywhere. It might not become a existential problem for the US economy -who knows- but it will most definitely crush any belief in The American Dream or that the US is some kind of world leader. Without a way to steer technology or force other nations to do what it wants by power, in my opinion, the US will go the route of ancient Rome by trying to hold on to what is lost. So maybe not an immediate existential issue but likely an existential threat to the Union nonetheless.
Broadly speaking if countries are able to feed their population, keep the lights on, and protect their borders, regardless of access to global markets then they have relatively few existential worries. The USA is one of a few in this category.
> but it will most definitely crush any belief in The American Dream or that the US is some kind of world leader.
The US is currently re-industrializing as globalism is crumbling, so the long term forecast for the American dream is bright. Globalism is crumbling greatly due to the bipartisan sentiment in the USA being not wanting to police, “lead,” the world any longer. The global population will crash in the coming decades, secessionist movements will rise up in many countries, famine, and resource wars will ensue, and the graphs of global development will go south very quickly. All except in the USA and a relatively few other countries which will feel pain but be able to recover relatively easily. The USA has been artificially propping up vast regions of the globe by making global shipping the safest it has ever been in history; that is ending and no one is going to like the result.
US is the second biggest manufacturing nation after China, but only on paper because of funny accounting, and statistical standards of America economists.
China beats the US in funny accounting by orders of magnitude!! China’s economy is a massive works program so a large chunk of their manufacturing ends up being trash essentially as there’s no requirement to produce products that people want.
China is about to run straight into a population wall, and is a kleptocracy that has funded itself off of the economic boom of transitioning from developing to developed economy - but it never developed the type of institutions to limit corruption which are needed to be a rich, developed economy.
Everything you see with censorship and social credit scores is geared towards one thing: pre-oppress the population to try and not be annihilated when the growth rate slows down to the point the trade off in freedoms is not worth it. The move towards a dictatorship is also a problem since dictatorships generally perform extremely badly economically if they're not resource economies that are independent of the treatment and quality of the labor.
America has much less key industries than China has. Any discussions about microchips are silly when much bigger elephants in the room are not talked about.
https://www.steel.org/2021/07/steel-imports-up-18-5-year-to-...
America is dangerously dependent on imported steel — all at the same time while having the best iron ore deposits, and coke deposits, and cheap energy.
Now, prepare for a total despair if you haven't seen this graph before:
https://thephillypi.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/162277872...
The situation across dozens more key industries is equally dire.
93% of North American steel produced each year is from recycled products [1], and 98% of products are recycled [2]. There is no reason to use either iron ore or coke for steel production when the vast majority of it is produced in electric arc furnaces from scrap steel. It's better economically and better environmentally.
This is also why Nucor has been eating U.S. Steel's lunch for about 50 years, long before China entered the steelmaking business.
[1] https://cssbi.ca/mid-rise-construction/sustainable-steel
Efficiencies of scale achieved by megamills cannot be achieved by small in-situ smelters, simple economics
Is there any way we can build them domestically again?
2. Nickel
3. Fertiliser https://static.nationmaster.com/assets/1ccceff/charts/rankin...
4. Non-ferrous alloys
5. Machinery parts, especially consumables like things (i.e. electrodes)
6. Powerplant machinery
7. Electrical distribution equipment, especially transformers
8. Merchant marine (even tiny Greece is ahead of US)
9. Shipbuilding, and naval engineering at large
10. Railways equipment, and vehicles
11. Pharma, with medical consumables, antibiotics, and other essential medicines in particular
12. Heavy industry in general
13. Chromium
14. Manganese
15. Vanadium
16. Chemical catalysts
17. Cobalt
Even more of a risk is that we can be strong-armed once we no longer have leverage. This is a reason to onshore critical pieces. And we can't have a fledgling domestic industry be cost competitive without tax and trade incentives.
The trade war needs to be an investment. Otherwise we'll just continue to cede ground.
A trade war might hurt, but an America without exports will hurt worse. As will an America that has to take what's given to it.