United States (US) President Donald Trump aims to keep American companies inside the US to secure American employment. International trade analysis suggests, though, this is a wrongheaded policy. The present situation is one where Japan, Korea, and members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) export intermediary goods to China, these countries’ subsidiaries or factories in China use a large proportion of these goods to assemble final goods for export to the US, European Union (EU), Japan, and elsewhere, and the US imports substantial amounts of assembled goods from China while exporting much less to China than those East Asian nations.