because America is supposed to be better and smarter than every other country.

shutting down export of medical supplies is bat-shit stupid and every world leader that did it are morons.

imagine a planet with 100 countries, but there are 2 countries, A and B, that are the best at producing item X. they can produce 1000 times more X per day than any other country, because they have massive factories and hordes of experienced workers who can churn them out 24/7, and have been doing so for 40 years, with supply chains that stretch over the whole globe.

now imagine some event occurs, which causes every country to close it's borders and prevent product X going over a border.

Now, you have 2 countries A and B who are churning out massive quantities of product X but they have no where to send it, and cant sell it. They start shutting their factories within a few weeks because its not profitable anymore.

Meanwhile those 98 other countries all try to either create their own factories to produce X, or they try to make some deal with A and B to buy X. These factories are obviously not going to overnight be as efficient as A and B. As noted, the other 98 countries are 1000 times slower than A and B. So since A and B shut their factories and the other 98 countries have these terrible, inefficient factories, the whole global world supply of product X actually goes down. And not just down, it falls off a cliff, it heads toward zero very very quickly.

So these terrible inefficient factories in the other 98 countries do not actually solve the supply problem. But A and B still have stockpiles of unsold product X. And shuttered factories. So the black market comes to existence, and people in the 98 countries start buying these piles of unsold stock from A and B, and unscrupulous people in A and B restart their factories in secret to produce illegal product X.

So the result is factories in A and B jack up the price of X, which now has to go through black market dealers and mules, all of whom jack the price up even more, and now in the end, in the 98 countries, only the dishonest and corrupt and rich who have connections to smugglers and criminals get all of the product X, and everyone else gets nothing.

It doesn't matter if X is carrots or laptops or medical masks, the rules are the same. This is what we learned in the 20th century in every communist country, in every country with prohibition, in basically every situation where there were free markets and non-free markets.

The difference in a pandemic is that the pandemic doesn't care about your borders. If rich country C gets all of the masks and vaccines, and poor country D gets zero masks and zero vaccines, that is not going to stop rich country C from getting infected by the virus when poor country D becomes a kind of reservoir for the virus to develop itself.

The only people who benefit from such a walled off, non-free system are the middle-men and bureaucrats who try to slice off a piece of every transaction for themselves. Every single other person in this system suffers less than if all 100 countries had just left the borders alone, and allowed country A and country B to keep churning out product X as fast as possible.

It's utter stupidity on a global scale.

If we ever had aliens invade the planet Earth, and the countries all decided they would ban the export of laser rifles, the Earth wouldn't stand a chance.