The US is waking up from a post-cold war reality. In the 1980s a consensus formed that. 1. US military and economic power meant that countries could be relied

The US is waking up from a post-cold war reality. In the 1980s a consensus formed that. 1. US military and economic power meant that countries could be relied on to follow US influenced IP laws or be excluded from the global market. 2. US military and economic power was large enough and benign enough that no major trading partner would pose an existential military or political threat - validated by the economic rise of Germany and Japan. These two ideas powered US and to a lesser extent European outsourcing for the next 40 years. Very few executives believed that there was a serious risk of their outsourced manufacturing or outsourced engineering firm becoming independent - and they certainly didn't think through the reality that in such an event the holding firm would not have the capital or knowledge to compete against the newly formed firm. The reality is that the US and Chinese economic spheres are likely to fracture in whole or in part. China owns the factories and the IP, the Chinese military is increasingly capable of achieving any military goal they are likely to have against the US military using indigenous military hardware. There is no reason the Chinese authorities would not support subsidiaries and joint ventures becoming independent by eliminating legally ambiguous joint ventures and Variable Interest Entities, forcing sales of Chinese assets to Chinese investors, or simply creating new legislation to free such entities from foreign corporations. I fear that the US has been so focused on outsourcing for the last 40 years that it's forgotten how unusual of a relationship outsourcing was in the first place, and why it wasn't done for most of the industrial era.