Comment by eitally
That last statement is absolutely true, but if you have a constrained domestic supply chain, high employee cost, and/or constrained margins on finished products, you're still going to have come out behind if you persist with domestic manufacturing rather than offshore. This is the calculus OEMs faced in the 1990s-2000s. The big bet that they all made is to assume relatively stable geopolitics, and that there wouldn't ultimately be a squeeze on the potential manufacturing constraints (labor, supply chain, capacity). Ultimately, it's proven to have been by far the smartest decision for high-vol / low-mix stuff: electronic components and consumer electronics (not to mention apparel and many industrial products).
Like I said in my previous comment, though, this doesn't mean the capability to build has left the US (or Europe). Just that the decision to continue investing in manufacturing things that aren't competitively profitable has been made and the capacity has been allocated to higher margin manufacturing (regulated industries, complex products, and products where customers are less price sensitive).
> The big bet that they all made is to assume relatively stable geopolitics
It's not just geopolitics. China required partnering with local companies and sharing IP. Even if they were geopolitically friendly, Western countries set up to build their own Chinese competition from scratch in exchange for lower labour costs, believing that either they could out-innovate China at design (even when Americans no longer understand how their own products get made), or that they'd be retired by the time it did matter.