That seems to be a safe assumption these days: I just don't see the US producing these better technologies itself at all. It's still pretty good at making cutting-edge software, but that's about it.
Chinese software engineering seems to be catching up extremely fast in this regard too. I'm surprised how often I find an interesting new open source tool or library on GitHub and the comments in the code are all in Mandarin.
Better along what metric? In a market, the axis is going to be cost which tariffs impact
If solar panels in general are a better tech (by whatever metric), then tariffing chinese solar panels and not subsidizing oil should result in more American solar panels being produced and beating out oil.
The extremely tough competition in Chinese market meant they worked extremely hard. First Solar would not have survived if they are in the same competition in China.
And did the Chinese stole IP from Americans that Americans don't even have? What does it take for people to understand Chinese people are people too, they are just like you, living and breathing human beings. No one is inferior, no one is dumber. People can be as just as capable.
I can also say industrial policy will fail. The primary reason Chinese companies, like solar and EVs, are where they are now is because extreme hard work and competition. The best thing happened to Chinese EV industry is inviting Tesla into the market, and everyone tried to create a more competitive product and leapfrog Tesla. Westerners say Chinese ppl don't like foreign companies and are nationalist is brainwashed by western media. Domestic brands are considered inferior, Tesla hold the prestige. But as companies are coming up with more leapfrogging products they are changing people's perceptions and mindshare. The biggest thing for domestic car companies they seem to successfully transformed Chinese people's perceptions of Chinese brands. People are no longer mindless envy international brands. If you seen how hard they worked, you will appreciate. They make Elon musk's hard work look easy. They won it fair and square. And they are not against just Tesla, in luxury segment, they are against BWM, Mercedes, Porsche. In mainstream, Ford, GM, Toyota. Decades of brand prestige and reputations.
and first solar is definitely being propped up by the US government. Longi's products can be more expensive than first solar's and there is still no reason to choose them. It just a better product
It doesn't look like the USA in 2024 has the capacity to build the whole supply chain for these. Solar's supply chain depends a lot on China, batteries are Chinese/Japanese/Korean tech; even nuclear might depend on a supply chain from Canada. Hydro are huge infrastructure projects, when was the last successful and on budget big infrastructure project the USA rolled out?
There's an underlying assumption the US is incapable, at the moment, to roll out supply chains for all of these better technologies.
Do you want to light a fire under domestic asses? Create incentives for it without having to hurt common people, your corporations and finance markets are incentivised to exploit your nation for profit, no matter the consequences, try to fix that issue instead.
Preventing cars from being imported from China is still a problem too. American companies are going to innovate slower without the competition. We may see a day when Chinese cars are just miles ahead of American cars in terms of technology, efficiency, comfort, and price. At that point, people are going to be asking “why am I paying so much for this shitty car when much better alternatives are available? Whatever happened to capitalism in this country?” And once those protections are lifted, the car industry would face rapid, destabilizing collapse.
A slower, controlled collapse (not saying that would definitely happen) of the US car industry would mean those resources (the capital and labor) would be able to be put to more productive uses in this country. There’s a lot of stuff we want to build, like modular nuclear power plants, wind turbines, geothermal plants, AI data centers, prefab new housing, humanoid robots, or some other stuff I can’t even imagine. I personally think robotaxis/AV are going to put the entire worldwide car industry into near terminal decline anyway. We should try to pivot away from that industry as gracefully as we can.
If we are incapable of producing good cars, what in the world makes you think we would be capable of producing any of the other things you mention? The "don't worry we can make high technology for export to others" shtick is exactly how the USA ended up in a $300B trade deficit to China. It's a lazy mentality and the result is inevitable atrophy of much more than just the industries you think we don't need.
A country the size of the US can and should be producing at least some (but probably most) of all modern necessities it requires, and motor vehicles will continue to be a necessity for the foreseeable future.
Tariffs don't discourage adoption of the best technologies, they discourage importing products from other countries.
If solar/wind/batteries/nuclear/hydro/whatever is better than oil, and there are high tariffs, the result will be onshore production of those technologies.
What gets in the way of that is subsidies, not tariffs.
Unless there is an underlying assumption that the US is incapable of producing these better technologies itself, in which case the US is probably fucked regardless.