One more thing, tangentially related but consider that Trump and co know they don’t have the political capital to actually keep tariffs of 100% on China and especially on things like chips and computers and smartphones. How then to coerce decoupling? By playing these uncertainty games. Businesses hate and cannot tolerate uncertainty. Whereas it’s easy to rally a bunch of corporations to go to Republicans and force them to repeal tariffs that have been left in place for months, it’s harder to rally everyone around stopping the constant dance of tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs of x amount, tariffs of shrug who knows. This kind of thing is a nudge to businesses to strongly encourage them to move production out of China, even to India, to any other country that has bent the knee and not retaliated against the US which isn’t a strategic communist rival like China. It’s less forceful but it creates an atmosphere of coercion where they can play the game of mass imports in bursts and holding inventory short term to prevent profit interruption but the looming threat encourages them to begin plans to move out of China. Consider that for a war or isolation of China scenario getting even a third of production out of China and to India would be enough to prevent the economy from totally imploding, it would lead to shortages and price shocks for consumers and a market crash but it would be something that could be tolerated and endured so total decoupling is not necessary in the eyes of these people, just prying a bit out.
One more thing, tangentially related but consider that Trump and co know they don’t have the political capital to actually keep tariffs of 100% on China and especially on things like chips and computers and smartphones. How then to coerce decoupling? By playing these uncertainty games. Businesses hate and cannot tolerate uncertainty. Whereas it’s easy to rally a bunch of corporations to go to Republicans and force them to repeal tariffs that have been left in place for months, it’s harder to rally everyone around stopping the constant dance of tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs of x amount, tariffs of shrug who knows. This kind of thing is a nudge to businesses to strongly encourage them to move production out of China, even to India, to any other country that has bent the knee and not retaliated against the US which isn’t a strategic communist rival like China. It’s less forceful but it creates an atmosphere of coercion where they can play the game of mass imports in bursts and holding inventory short term to prevent profit interruption but the looming threat encourages them to begin plans to move out of China. Consider that for a war or isolation of China scenario getting even a third of production out of China and to India would be enough to prevent the economy from totally imploding, it would lead to shortages and price shocks for consumers and a market crash but it would be something that could be tolerated and endured so total decoupling is not necessary in the eyes of these people, just prying a bit out.