It's politics.

The US's corporate problems in the 1980s and early 1990s existed when strong international competition existed.

It began to change with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_U.S.%E2%80%93Japan_Semico... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord.

It was accelerated further with things like anti-circumvention clauses in Free Trade agreements (see Cory Doctrow's recent highlighting of this: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/) and then had more gasoline thrown on the fire in the ZIRP/easy money era post GFC, culminating with the bazooka of stimulus unleashed post-covid.

My best guess is we are now going to witness ~20 years of slow unwind. You can already see signs of this in things like RoW/EM stocks outperforming the S&P, treasury yields diverging from other "safe haven" soverign bonds (e.g. swiss), gold price rising, Europe starting to get serious about addressing the Draghi report's findings, European defence spending increasing, China starting to act like the "adult in the room" wrt the recent Iran/US blow-up etc. Essentially, countries/blocs attempting to re-assert sovereignty that has been willingly diluted over the last ~30 years to mainly America's benefit.