In 2025 the United States imported $309 billion of goods from China, down from $539 billion in 2018. China's share of American imports fell from 21.2 percent to 13.4 percent by 2024. Freund, Mattoo, Mulabdic and Ruta traced ten-digit import lines from 2017 to 2022 for the World Bank. The countries replacing China tended to be deeply integrated with China. "To displace China on the export side, countries must embrace China's supply chains." Schulze and Xin at the IMF, June 2025, value-added tables to 2022. "Chinese value added has been increasingly exported to the US through other countries". The one place decoupling looks real is Vietnam. Its domestic value added in strategic exports to America ran 10 and 12 percentage points above the counterfactual by 2022, Chinese value added fell, and the authors call it reallocation, not rerouting. Real factories. And who built them. It counts eight more greenfield projects committing Chinese capital to Vietnam's electrical and machinery sector than the counterfactual by 2022, and offers that "Chinese firms relocate their production to Vietnam through greenfield FDI". Then what it cannot see. "Due to the lack of information on the ultimate ownership of these FDI projects, we caution that the effects on FDI could include those from Chinese firms and non-Chinese firms in China." American origin rules cannot see it either. Under 19 CFR 134.1 another country becomes the country of origin only if work there effects a "substantial transformation". Ownership is not in the definition. So the two instruments that would tell a government whether decoupling worked, the customs rule and the value-added table, both record place. Neither records command. A tariff can move a production line across a border. It cannot move the line out of anyone's reach, and the accounts that certify success cannot ask. Sovereignty is a relation to territory. Coercion is a relation to command. A backup supplier is a backup only if no one can order both lines to stop at once, and that is the one variable the ledgers do not carry. A state can decouple its map and keep its exposure, and cannot know which it has done. Two counterweights. Over 80 percent of American industrial inputs are sourced at home, and American, Japanese and Korean investment into Vietnam rose alongside Chinese. If an ownership-resolved series shows the Chinese-controlled share of Vietnam's strategic exports to America falling, the claim dies.