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This is the bilingual post in English and Vietnamese. Vietnamese is below.

Đây là bài viết song ngữ Anh-Việt. Tiếng Việt ở bên dưới.

English

A paradox that leaves many people baffled

Some facts, placed side by side, create a paradox that makes you rub your eyes, and the United States in early September 2026 has exactly such a paradox.

On one side, every signal speaks of a return of domestic manufacturing. Private-sector manufacturing investment commitments have reached about 1.966 trillion USD. Non-residential fixed investment rose 11.7% in the latest quarter, the fastest pace since 2023, while orders for business equipment are on track to hit an all-time high for the year. The ISM manufacturing PMI reached 54.6% in August, expanding for the eighth consecutive month and near a four-year high. Tens of thousands of factory-construction and manufacturing jobs have been created. And overarching all of it is a high wall of tariffs, whose stated goal is to bring production home and reduce dependence on imports.

On the other side, one number runs straight against that whole story. Precisely when investment is at a record and tariffs are striking hard to reduce imports, U.S. manufacturing imports have hit a four-year high. More strikingly, capital goods, that is, machinery and equipment, now make up more than 40% of all U.S. goods imports, an unprecedented share. In other words, precisely when the country is trying to produce more at home, it is importing more than ever.

To a skimming reader, these two sides contradict each other so much that one of them must be wrong. Either the manufacturing return is illusory, or the import figure is an anomaly. And this is where the paradox becomes dangerous, because depending on which side people believe, they draw opposite conclusions. Those who want to praise the policy will look at investment and jobs. Those who want to criticize it will look at rising imports and say the strategy is failing, that tariffs are not working, that this is proof of the whole effort’s futility.

But both of those readings miss a third possibility, and that third possibility is the key: perhaps both sides are true at the same time, and it is precisely their being true together that is the most instructive thing. Perhaps the surge in imports is not evidence that the effort to build domestic capacity is failing, but on the contrary, a sign that it is genuinely happening. Perhaps, to be more self-reliant later, an economy is forced to be more dependent up front. And if that sounds illogical, it is precisely because we have not yet viewed it through the right lens, a lens that anyone who has ever gone through a major change has felt in their bones, even if they could not name it.