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It's a bi-partisan issue. Hell, I would agree it's not even a exclusively US issue but is pretty much generalized throughout the west.

Shifting manufacturing to China makes absolute sense when you look and care about the the quarterly/yearly performance. And if you decide not to do it well tough luck because your competitor is and will have better results than you.

If you look at it with a 20/30 years perspective then it becomes obvious that outsourcing is completely the wrong move. You basically get rid of your local expertise, train your replacements, slim down your middle class (the folks buying the products!). Then your manufacturing partner starts vertically integrating and designing it's own competing products and you are pretty much left out of the equation. It's almost as if, thanks to support from the party, Chinese businesses can plan for 20 years ahead but western companies can't because they HAVE to maximize the quarterly results!

> I argued that, even in the presence of free trade, a country should have the ability to tariff imports to the extent that that country could maintain a 25% (or something) domestic market share.

Tariffs and trade wars seem completely useless to me when done between G7 countries because we're all in the same situation regarding China. To achieve any sort of paradigm shift we'd need to stop each having a 1:1 relationship with China and start negotiating as a block.