The U.S. is on pretty sound financial footing, at least as far as international trade and current account balances go.

Not what I meant, of course. We now spend the almost the equivalent of our defense budget on interest alone. That means that current American taxpayers are spending a fairly large chunk of the budget on the past instead of on the future. Which means we don't have unlimited money to spend on more new stuff.

It doesn't make us weaker that we get a lot of our consumer goods like apparel and footwear from Cambodia and Vietnam, rather than trying to do it ourselves - it makes us stronger, because it allows us to devote more of our resources into high-value things rather than spending more on those basics.

Which would be why I'm not talking about clothes or mops: I've specifically mentioned semiconductors, ships, large engineering infrastructure and construction equipment. There's more beyond that, but you get the idea.

There was nothing wrong with the policy of identifying a few key industries where re-shoring might confer some strategic value, while refraining from disrupting the entire global economic order.

I didn't like the CHIPs act for one simple reason: it would have (actually, it will) turn Intel in the "United States Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation", allowing them to wallpaper over years of execution missteps. That's the problem with subsidies, sometimes the behavior you get isn't what you really need.

It's not just how he's going about it - what he's trying to do is bad policy

There's nothing wrong with on-shoring critical manufacturing items.