I'm still basically a free trade advocate. But I do recognize it has had
bad effects at home despite the general pattern of good effects here.
I would like to see reliance on China for the production of key
products dispersed to other more friendly countries even if it is
impossible (because we simply can't do them cheaply enough to make
sense) to bring those factories home.
It will be difficult to decouple
given the weight of what was shifted there over decades. So we'd best
start now. Perhaps we can help shift that production to allies who could use the work.
Shifting terms of trade toward America after the post-World War II
policy of tilting them to allies and friends for strategic reasons when
our economy was dominant in a war-ravaged world is not inappropriate. So
I'm against a policy of autarky but for a policy of revised free trade
terms.
And good grief, I certainly don't blame "globalism" for the Xi
Jinping Flu pandemic. That's silly. That blame falls on the Chinese Communist Party.