Americans should care because America isn't the world. So much wealth and power derives from people seeing you as the good guy. Blowing that up will make America poorer.
And nobody has has seen America as the “good guy” in my lifetime. We’re the country that destabilizes Latin American and Asian countries, bombs the Middle East, etc. I used to think there was at least a logic to all that, but it turns out our elites were just ideologues and morons.
There are boycott’s afoot and I wouldn’t be surprised if canada and Europe will choose more Chinese and domestic in the future.
Basically, the US closing its borders will lead to a Chinese world leadership which is not good for the US either.
I'm no economist but a trade deficit in the hundreds of billions[0] suggests otherwise.
[0] Wikipedia says 773B for 2023.
Again, I'm not an economist, bear with me and explain what that's got to do with the trade deficit being a deficit? You could have a GDP of a quintillion dollars a year but if you're consistently running a trade deficit (which the US has for decades), that strongly implies you cannot close your borders with impunity.
If you could supply the goods cheaper than importing them, people would, no? Simple capitalism!
When it comes to isolation I think of this:
The word invasion itself is a good example of this.
A French ironmaster says: "We must protect ourselves from the invasion of English iron!" An English landlord cries: "We must repel the invasion of French wheat!" And they urge the erection of barriers between the two nations. Barriers result in isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred; hatred, to war; war, to invasion. "What difference does it make?" say the two sophists. "Is it not better to risk the possibility of invasion than to accept the certainty of invasion?" And the people believe them, and the barriers remain standing.
And yet, what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion? What possible similarity can there be between a warship that comes to vomit missiles, fire, and devastation on our cities, and a merchant vessel that comes to offer us a voluntary exchange of goods for goods?The US isn't far less dependent, China is at 37% GDP from trade to the US's 27% but doesn't have the structural dependency on trade from having the reserve currency.
But after having spent years living in China, and being very familiar with the political situation there and their global ambitions, I'm afraid that the alternative to the US is even worse.
Have a democratic system has somewhat of a moderating effect on the worst impulses of the US elite. China has no such guardrails.
At least China’s unelected bureaucrats are competent and actually focused on what’s good for the public: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...
There's a lot you don't know about how things actually work in China. The levels of autocracy, corruption and lack of true legal framework, make the US look like a democratic haven.