Before the pandemic, economic decoupling between China and the United States seemed unlikely. Of course, the Trump administration had wielded trade policy on behalf of its “America First” agenda: it jettisoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a proposed trade agreement between the United States and eleven Pacific Rim nations — and levied tariffs to a degree not seen since the 1930s on primary goods from China and the European Union.

Yet onlookers viewed these disruptions to the pace of globalization as an aberration that would be corrected by a future Democratic president or, more fancifully, a Republican Party purged of Trumpists. There was some justification to this reasoning. Even at its most audacious, the Trump administration did not significantly alter the global distribution of labor and production, whether for sweatshirts or semiconductors. While defense hawks and some foreign policy realists spoke of an inevitable great-power competition with China, trade policy was only haltingly folded into national security concerns.

The latest export controls that the Biden administration has slapped on China are, however, clear signs that we are entering a qualitatively different era. The supply chain crisis that the pandemic triggered has prompted a profound reconsideration among Democratic officials of the merits of deeper globalization. This has left an opening for a restrictionist approach toward China — but also toward free trade more generally — to gain force in the Democratic Party.