Eyck Freymann

So if you don't develop a solution to this transshipment problem, there is no way that you can decouple from China, even a little bit, even in a crisis.

That to me is very scary.

And the process of working with other countries to address this, essentially this is rules of origin for trade.

This is a big enterprise that is going to take years and years to do.

It cannot be done right away.

So what we're talking about with avalanche decoupling is a process that abandons the fiction that we can do this all at once and starts thinking about if we need to divorce China 10%, 30%, 60%, whatever it is,

How do we go about building a new kind of economic order such that we can still have trading relations with the rest of the world?

And that question has not been addressed until this book.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

The only way you can get this stuff done is if you work with your partners.

That's the only way.

And that's not about being moralistic.

It's about practically speaking, there's stuff that we don't know how to make in this country anymore because we outsourced it two generations ago and there literally aren't any people left who know how it's done.

And Japan or South Korea in particular, but many of our European partners too, have this know-how in advanced manufacturing.

And not to partner with them, I think, is kind of crazy.

Also, they face the same problems, the same risks of economic coercion by China.

And they have even less leverage to push back against China because China, relatively speaking, is much bigger than they are.

So I think the Trump administration has a few correct ideas dealing with these rules of origin through these bilateral deals, doing bilateral economic security pacts like with Japan.

But we need to be bringing larger groups of allies and partners together to do this.

This is something I learned in the process of working on this book and the previous book.