" China exports essential industrial components to the United States. It is also a geopolitical competitor with the United States. If events force China to accept economic and financial costs for geopolitical advantage, it could talk itself into imposing an embargo. This results in a massive geopolitical vulnerability for the US. In addition to wanting to change economic relationships on a global level, the US urgently needed to do so first with China.
US efforts to distance itself from the rest of the world have predictably caused internal and external turmoil. Done more slowly, it would have caused merely long-term unease. Unease and turmoil are both parts of obsolete geopolitical models. The evolution of those models is both disruptive and poorly understood because of the perception that the forces of geopolitical necessity seem less deterministic than the forces behind economics.
But the truth—and this is the point of this story—is that the forces of humanity as a whole generate impersonal pressures that overwhelm human preferences as they define reality. The transition to new realities was less bloody than the end of the European age in 1945 and the emergence of the American age. But on the other hand, it did not change the fundamental geopolitical reality. Where Europe was replaced as the center of the world, the US remains the center, so the turmoil is not the beginning of the storm, but the last storm before the new calm."

mauldineconomics.com - How we got here