Navarro, the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, told me that the coronavirus epidemic illustrates how the United States is “dependent on foreign sources” for crucial medicines and medical supplies.

Nearly all surgical and most respirator masks used in the U.S., for instance, are manufactured in other countries such as China and Mexico, resulting in shortages during the current crisis. But the challenges extend beyond medical supplies central to the coronavirus outbreak. Yanzhong Huang, a global-health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that China is the largest exporter of medical devices to the United States, and that about 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in American drugs come from China and India. “Chinese pharmaceutical firms have captured 97 percent of the U.S. market for antibiotics and more than 90 percent of the market for vitamin C,” he wrote. “In 2018, 95 percent of ibuprofen, 91 percent of hydrocortisone, 70 percent of acetaminophen, and 40–45 percent of [the blood thinner] heparin imported to the United States came from China.”

Navarro argued that the “the Obama-Biden administration” was repeatedly reminded of America’s reliance on other countries but ultimately “did nothing,” whereas Trump has focused on “bringing supply chains, jobs, and production home” and aims to “reduce this dependency, strengthen our public-health industrial base, and protect the American people.” (The Trump administration has yet to prove that its policies have brought about a renaissance in American manufacturing, which was in recession during the second half of 2019.)

Navarro proposed that the U.S. government should encourage high-tech domestic manufacturing of medical supplies and ensure that everything it procures across federal agencies “is domestically sourced.” This “buying American” should include “not just the finished products, like the pills and face masks and ventilators,” but also “the critical components, precursor chemicals, and advanced pharmaceutical ingredients we need for production,” he said.

His conception of the world in the grips of an epidemic is more dog-eat-dog than lion-lying-down-with-lamb, with America left alone to fend for itself just like every other country. Navarro, an architect of Trump’s “America first” trade policies and author of such books as Death by China and The Coming China Wars, has suggested that while America’s foreign-dependency problem has a lot to do with China, it even encompasses the United States’ closest friends. “In crises like this, we have no allies,” Navarro noted on Fox News recently, alleging that Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom “denied us what we needed” in terms of medical provisions during the 2009 swine-flu outbreak. “We got to get [medical supply chains] back onshore” from China, India, and Europe, he said.