[ericmay]

In my mind there are two scenarios:

1. He's literally just a moron and is fixated on tariffs. Many think that's most likely but something tells me it's not the whole story.

2. They see a war with China coming in the next few years and they need to decouple as quickly as possible and make sure the US is not reliant on China or Chinese manufactured products, while also potentially harming Chinese trade. Something to ask here is, if we thought we were going to war with China over Taiwan in the next few years what actions would we take now to better positions ourselves for that coming war? Making our allies angry doesn't seem to be helping, but were EU members really going to send troops to the Pacific to defend Taiwan anyway? Certainly not when they have Russia at their doorstep.

[woshiwan]

Agree with the decoupling, but based on what happened during his last term, tariff doesn’t seem to work for decoupling right?

As you said, China just shifted their manufacturing to southeast asia and many of them are still backed by Chinese money. Also the made in US thing didn’t really happen either.

[ericmay]

In the latter case the US just enacted high tariffs on those countries as well. Regarding made in US, well, Apple products for example were exempted from the tariffs. This time they aren't.

[ytpete]

If we wanted to decouple from China due to fears of war, shouldn't we be keeping tariffs on EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Korea very low? We'd want them to stay closely aligned with us as allies, not push them to build stronger connections to China as a more friendly trading partner than we are.

[ericmay]

Mostly yea, but I think if you say to yourself the US needs manufacturing capacity no matter who it comes from those tariffs make a little more sense. Also they would levy that China has set up manufacturing facilities in countries like Canada for example to bypass tariffs.

I'm not saying I agree with this, just trying to think through what they may be thinking for fun internet discussions. Personally I love our allies and I think they make us way stronger and we should work together with them to address concerns.

[woshiwan]

Here comes the 90 days pause except China :)

[robocat]

Also the Ukraine is showing how much drone warfare is dependent on Chinese manufacturing: motors, PCBs, batteries, fibre optic cable yadda yadda yadda.

I wonder if the end goal of wanting onshore manufacturing is to be able to defend or attack using cheap modern electronics.

[robocat]

Article on Chinese drone manufacturing vis military use:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/26/1094249/china-co...