Can the United States Decouple from China?(foreignpolicy.com) |
Can the United States Decouple from China?(foreignpolicy.com) |
Should the US decouple from China? Yes. But the US no longer has the capability to do that.
Will the US decouple from China? Nope. The US will be demoted from 'exceptional' to 'also ran'.
Defining “industrial infrastructure” would be a good start. What do you mean by that? Remembering your audience are most likely the actual people who are building/built that infrastructure…this isn’t a Pol Sci 101 course.
90% or more of that has disappeared from the US since the late 1980s. Mostly that has come from the financialisation of US industry whereby (ferinstance) the aviation designers and engineers in Boeing's management have been displaced by MBAs and Accountants whose raison d'etre is to make big profits rather than excellent aircraft. Or else by outsourcing manufacturing from the US to other countries, just to increase profits due to lower manufacturing costs. Absolutely great for the financials of a particular company, absolutely bad for the US as a whole.
Then again, the skilled workers in the US have been replaced by skilled workers in China, Vietnam, et al because they didn't cost as much as US skilled workers did. The fact that there are now very few skilled workers in the US is because those skilled workers that used to exist have retired or died off long ago.
Trump reckoned he could get companies to return to the US from China. It didn't happen: no more skilled workers and no more factories for them to use anyway, if perchance there were any workers who remained in a particular field.
When it comes to getting new aviation engineers (for instance) the US doesn't produce enough STEM graduates to have a big enough reservoir to draw from.
Specialised industrial knowledge is a whole field of its own. The US periodically states that it is going back to the Moon. Fat chance. The specialised industrial knowledge has evaporated, such as working in specialised materials like titanium, solid-fuel propellants, liquid-oxygen high-speed pumps, or specialised software for on-board computers for astronaut pilots, or even Space-operations-oriented planners like Wernher von Braun or Gene Kranz, even down to the guys who could transport a loaded space craft from the assembly building to the launch-pad a mile or two away. Come to think of it, do those huge, slow transporter machines themselves exist any more?
By the way, the US still imports rocket motors from Russia. Rockets whose 40-50 year-old design is better and cheaper than the US can produce today, hence why they still get imported.