[jeswin]

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.

[rntksi]

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.