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The China threat doesn't really make much sense. China hasn't had any real colonial amibitions throughout its history, and is on the other side of the pacific. China isn't really a threat. A growing China is a large market for American products and the elite don't want to lose that market.
The working class hates China because of wage dumping. The military industrial complex is using the China hate for a military build up that aims to protect the wage dumping that caused the recruits to hate China. Rust belters are joining the marines to take revenge on the Asians for dumping wages by defending a wage dumping chip factory on Taiwan.
A more nationalist policy of bringing industry home doesn't jive well with America as a financial empire. The US can't have real estate speculation as a cornerstone of its economy while being a manufacturing center. If rents for apartments are at extortion levels, there is no way fridges can be manufactured in a major American city. American workers cost a fortune as they require expensive housing, expensive medical care and a car for commuting. Manufacturing toasters is incompatible with an economy built on finance, real estate and insurance.
It is also incompatible with the level of affluence America enjoys in 2024. Chainsaw Al ended American toaster-making around 2000, by which time Sunbeam was an outlier as a surviving onshore manufacturer of low-tech products. The country which reaches 2000-America levels of affluence with a manufacturing-driven economy is Germany, and they don't make toasters.
The "China threat" is that a Chinese attack on Taiwan that either seizes control of TSMC or knocks it offline is catastrophic for the semiconductor supply chain that is a critical dependency for so much of the modern economy, including several of America's most successful companies. If American did make toasters, then they would have chips in, and the American toaster industry would be critically vulnerable to a chip shortage caused by a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
High-end chips are so hard to make that it looks like the world is too small to support a redundant supply chain for them. America is definitely too small to support even a single autarchic chip supply chain.
It doesn't make sense to spend hundreds of billions a year to defend a 30 billion dollar factory. While building a fab is exorbitantly expensive, building a navy to defend it is slower and more expensive.
The Navy isn't there to defend one 30-billion-dollar factory. It's there to defend all the 30-billion-dollar factories, and the capacity to make more of them. Among many other things of course.
The important thing about TSMC is the tradition, not the 30-billion-dollar fabs. The current saga about TSMC seeking exceptions to CHIPS Act Buy American requirements strongly suggests that if America spent 30 billion dollars on a 3nm fab built and run by Americans, they wouldn't end up with a working 3nm fab. And moving the tradition to a non-Chinese-speaking country is hard because of the language barrier - Paul Graham says you could definitely transfer the tradition that makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley by bringing over 10,000 people and you could probably do it with 500 people, but he is thinking about moving it to another English-speaking city. The other problem bringing the tradition to America (although not to a hungry middle-income country like Malaysia) is that America is still too proud to let in 500-10,000 Taiwanese and treat them like authority figures to be learned from - and a political culture dominated by MAGA populism and left-populism optimised as a foil to MAGA populism is even less able to do that.
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Presumably, the thinking of the pro-manufacturing Americans is that the economy can go back to being built on making things as opposed to "number go up."
And while China has never had colonial ambitions, we presently see the tinge of revanchism in their words and deeds. A different flavor, but one that still slides over the tongue in the same way.
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