1) Previous state was achieved by cooperation and that state was negative to the US because it was preferring shippers in China at the expense of the shippers in the United States?

2) The new state was achieved by throwing the weight around and it is less negative to the US because it will decrease the current preference for shippers to China as the expense of the shippers in the United States? The new state has been achieved by throwing the weight around.

That's what is at hand.

It is like bugs in code. One can either fix the bug therefore making the codebase less buggy or one can talk about having everyone agree that a bug needs to be fixed and not fixed the bug.

At the end, the customer does not care about how the bug is fixed, the customer wants a bug fixed.