Not long ago, executives at the Dutch multinational Royal DSM, a globe-girdling maker of nutritional supplements and high-tech materials, used to require a battery of internal studies to decide where to do a deal or locate a new manufacturing plant.

But today, “we won’t even do the study,” Stephan B. Tanda, the managing board member with responsibility for the Americas, told me. “It’s clear it will be the United States.”

The United States, he points out, has lots of cheap natural gas and a very lightly regulated labor market. At the same time, China, where Royal DSM has some 40 plants, is losing its edge. “It is less attractive than it used to be as a source from which to serve the world,” Mr. Tanda said.

For the last time the United States was as competitive as it is now, he added, “you have to go back to before the first oil shock in the 1970s.” Of the $3.6 billion in acquisitions by Royal DSM since 2010, 80 percent has come to the United States.