I never really hear anyone talking about how the dollar being the world reserve currency necessarily means that domestic manufacturing will decline over time, so I'll explain it here: Imagine gold was still the money used all over the world for international trade and that every gold mine in the entire world was located in Australia: • Australia would have far more gold per capita than any other country, meaning local prices for goods and services would be higher than everywhere else b/c there would just be more gold to go around. • Thus, other countries would be generally working with lower prices in gold, meaning goods manufactured in that country would demand a lower gold price. • Due to this discrepancy, any goods produced as efficiently in other countries would still be cheaper for Australians to import than to produce domestically. • Over time, any manufacturing would gradually phase out in Australia as what remains profitable there--aside from gold mining--is services, since those generally cannot be imported. • In turn, Australia's primary export would be gold since it would be desired for all international trade. This is what has hollowed out manufacturing in the US. Ever since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, the dollar has been the world's reserve currency. It is the primary currency of international trade and thus the most widely-accepted currency in the world. As manufacturing capabilities have increased across the world, we increasingly trade green paper for goods. We get those goods on the cheap because dollars are harder to come by abroad than domestically. You can also see this effect at a smaller scale in places like the UAE where they are able to import vast sums of wealth per capita into the desert because they have enormous oil reserves, and oil is as close to being money as any commodity gets these days. They don't have to create their own wealth domestically because the can export oil for dollars and then use those dollars on imports. Dubai does have some manufacturing, but that's not what built one of the most impressive city skylines in the world in the middle of the desert. It ultimately comes down to supply & demand, which applies to money the same way it applies to everything else. We have a higher supply of dollars because they are created here, and so it is cheaper to buy goods from locations where the supply of dollars is lower. Tariffs aren't the solution because free trade isn't the problem.