I agree with your analysis. But it begs the question of why we put up with it.
Why did we allow Japan, Korea, and now China to maintain an enormous trade surpluses with us for so long? This isn't some new problem as you know. It's been going on for at least 25 years.
Who benefits from this gargantuan transfer of financial leverage from the United States to foreign states?
Why is our political system incapable of dealing with it effectively?
The situation is difficult to understand because there are so many factors that cause this, some of them quite obscure. These massive imports do have the effect of fighting inflation, which politicians clearly want to do. They don't understand that the actual price of goods is irrelevent. It only matters in relation to people's buying power. Also, the "chamber of commerce" constituency of both parties, i.e. big business, which is the largest contributor to the parties, wants the cheap labor and cheap goods because it means profits for them. Then there are people who genuinely believe that the trade policies we're pursuing, which is really a policy to do nothing, is philosophically the best way to go. Then there's the simple fact that the U.S. business environment isn't that good and we've priced ourselves out of many markets through taxation, regulation, litigation, and unions. Think of the difficulty of building a new factory. It's almost impossible. It's a whole confluence of factors that work against us and probably can't be solved.