It was good... for a while. And it was a "small amount of directly affected people". I mean, so long as you ignore places like St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Camden, etc., and the powers-that-be seemed to be okay with doing that. It's a major part of why the center of the country turned out the way it did politically, but whatever. What's done is done.

But then China expanded outside of cheap low-value-add goods and started to get into higher-value-add goods, and started directly competing with our industries in those spaces. They could source stuff cheaper and put major chunks of industry out of business. Now the US is a service economy, has major problems with cranking out large quantities of high-quality goods, and the Chinese are starting to look at Taiwan with even more malicious intent.

Now Europe seems to want to sign up for the same package, because of supposed American political and diplomatic instability, even though the instability is the US government acting at home more and more like the Chinese government does (censorship, thin-skinned leadership, excessive exercise of the state's monopoly on violence, etc.).

Nothing to be done about it. The continent will have to learn the hard way, as we did.