I've thought long and hard about free trade. Ultimately, people want cheap products and free trade optimizes for price that's it. It's like this single objective function that disregards all other functions.

So the competitive advantage for any country now boils down to the entire nation optimizing for cost. A country like China can do this, because the cost optimization for USA = lifting someone out of poverty in China. They are at the rock bottom of cost already.

Now that China has learned to optimize for cost, they will continue down that path - AI, robotics whatever tool they can amass to drive down cost, they will.

Meanwhile, other nations arbitrage about quality of life, politics, hatred of the rich so on and so forth and let the cost optimization slide. Ideally if every country optimized for cost, free trade would work like magic. Sadly, China is the only country doing that and rest of the world is now beholden to them, losing their once cherished competitive advantage.

Now China which once was derided for cheap quality has learned to build quality at scale and for cheap. Literally no one can compete with them on price:quality ratio. 3-4 decades of cost optimizations have paid off immensely for them.