India, Oct. 8 -- The US President Donald Trump is making American manufacturing great again, at least on paper, and in terms of long-term (spread over a decade) investment promises. Recently, the White House provided an extremely detailed list of commitments by large foreign and local companies, as well as by nations. In this two-part series, we examine the how, why, and what of these trends, and whether they are likely to rewrite the map of American reindustrialisation.

Looking at the national assurances, one can see that from Tokyo to Riyadh, Seoul to London, Governments are quietly repositioning themselves around Washington's new economic push. As nations graduate to ideas, patents, copyrights, proprietary technologies, and climbing u...