President Trump’s tariff threats have turned into a play for cold, hard cash as he tries to leverage U.S. economic power to cajole other nations to make multibillion-dollar investments in order to maintain access to America’s market. If the US were a developing economy with very high investment needs and insufficient domestic saving to fund them, this "cold, hard cash" would indeed be good news. If correctly managed, it would lead to higher US investment and so higher US growth But the US isn't a developing economy, and there aren't large amounts of frustrated investment projects that businesses and the US government have been unable to fund. We can see this, for example, in the $1-2 trillion in cash sitting on US business balance sheets, even after spending trillions in stock buybacks, dividend payments, acquisitions and the transfer of production facilities abroad. This wouldn't be the case if Americans had been eager but unable to invest in domestic projects because of lack of funding As it is, the US already has roughly $1 trillion annually in net foreign inflows into the economy, and rather than boost US investment, these inflows boost the value of the dollar, making businesses all the more more reluctant to invest in domestic manufacturing production Telling countries to choose between reducing their trade surpluses with the US or increasing their investment in the US suggests a very muddled understanding of trade. It is precisely because these countries have implemented domestic trade and industrial policies that result in trade surpluses that they must invest abroad, and it is because they prefer to invest that money in the US that the US must run the corresponding deficits.
What the US needs is more foreign demand, not more foreign investment. The two are not equivalent.