America and the rest of the free world outsourced essential capacity to unreliable or hostile dictatorships. Globalization is a boon, but disconnecting economics from democratic values can lead to disaster.
In Winter Is Coming, I recommended "dictatorship replacement" trade policies to increase leverage over the world's worst regimes, encouraging them to reform & uniting the world's democracies in solidarity and self-sufficiency.
Instead, the easy but slippery path of engagement was chosen, supporting authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China. It has failed, as it always does. They haven't liberalized at all and influence has spread the other way.
In WWII, American manufacturing quickly retooled to supply the entire Allied forces with everything from food to trucks to fighter planes. Now it will take over a year to make masks? It's a failure of will—of the past 20+ years, not just today.
I'm a firm believer in free markets and free trade. The US can't go back to full-scale manufacturing any more than it can go back to coal. But putting your economy and your lives in the hands of brutal dictatorships is suicidal.
My mother had her 83rd birthday yesterday and she remembers surviving on cans of American pork in Baku during WWII. Now America seems a beggar. (New Yorker cartoon from Stettinius's 1944 "Lend-Lease, Weapon for Victory" book.) 
