Comment on “How Did Trump's 2025 Trade War Affect the Decoupling of US –China Supply Chains?”

Bown (2026) offers a timely and detailed product-level account of how the composition of US import sources changed during 2025.US real goods imports from the world increased by 4%, while real imports from China fell by 28%, reducing China's share of US imports to 9%.Behind these aggregate figures, changes in the composition of US import sources varied substantially across products.By organizing the evidence according to products' treatment under the 2018-2019 tariffs and tracing monthly imports by source country, Bown (2026) interprets the variation across products in light of tariff exemptions, cross-country tariff differentials, and the pre-existing geography of internationalized production.