A country could become harder to coerce through a supply cutoff without buying any less from its rival. Consider a factory that develops an alternative supplier. The replacement is tested, has spare capacity and can deliver before inventories run out. The factory keeps ordering from its original supplier because the price is better. Its purchases have barely changed. Its ability to survive a refusal has. That distinction matters when reading the American trade numbers. US Census Bureau figures show goods imports from China falling from about $539 billion in 2018 to $309 billion in 2025. Those are nominal purchases, not a measurement of how much production a Chinese cutoff could stop. In a 2023 World Bank working paper, Caroline Freund, Aaditya Mattoo, Alen Mulabdic and Michele Ruta examined detailed US imports from 2017 to 2022. Countries gaining ground as US suppliers tended to have strong supply links with China. Buying from a different country could leave Chinese inputs further back in the chain. But these were patterns in trade data, not an inventory of every factory's indispensable parts. There is evidence of real manufacturing relocation too. In a 2025 International Monetary Fund working paper covering 2018 to 2022, Tatjana Schulze and Weining Xin estimated that Vietnam's strategic exports to America contained higher Vietnamese and lower Chinese value-added shares than their comparison model predicted. The result argues against treating Vietnam's gains as mere repackaging. It does not establish how those exports would withstand a cutoff. Following inputs upstream reveals more, but still cannot answer that question alone. In a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Richard Baldwin, Rebecca Freeman and Angelos Theodorakopoulos found that including indirect connections made US exposure to Chinese industrial inputs more than four times the direct measure in 8 of 17 sectors. Their figures describe 2018. Their method also leaves out how readily one input can replace another. A cheap component with no substitute can stop production. An expensive purchase with several ready substitutes may give its seller little power to threaten the buyer. Spending shares cannot tell those situations apart. This changes what a government should demand in return for the cost of resilience. Another supplier's address is insufficient. The alternative must remain usable during the disruption it is meant to cover. Two factories relying on the same restricted material may offer no escape from that restriction. Maintaining an alternative can cost money even when no emergency comes. That expense can buy the ability to refuse a demand while continuing ordinary trade. The protection may never appear as a fall in imports from the original supplier. The import bill records who received the order. Bargaining power also depends on who could receive the next one.