The market decided that the most efficient transaction is to offshore all of this infrastructure to geopolitically-compromised areas and pray that China never does what every other emerging power in the history of geopolitics has done.
The market chose wrong.
> The market chose wrong.
Oh no, the market chose right, but what the "market" wants doesn't align with what the nation requires.
I am curious what you mean by this precisely. What other emerging powers have done what?
EDIT: There really does seem to have been this mindset in the 80s and 90s regarding China that they were going to liberalize once we shipped them a bunch of our industry and IP. You can only really believe that would happen if two things are true:
1) You have a woeful misunderstanding of Chinese politics
2) You think that the West, and the US in particular, have some sort of magic that will invariably keep us ahead of the Chinese. Maybe it was racism, maybe it was underestimating the power of collectivism, but there were people who really saw China as nothing more than a workforce that would happily do whatever Western companies wanted them to do, while providing absolutely no competition, forever and ever.