And you end up with the US getting hosed while the rest of us swim in cheap EVs.

The US would be the only country to suffer in this scenario. The rest of the world would be just fine with using cheaper memory while we shoot ourselves in the foot to spite them.

I'm sure they'll try to ban Chinese memory for "national security reasons" but the differences here are that memory is much easier to smuggle in, and even if not, them flooding other markets would free up more supply of other manufacturers enough that we should see major price drops anyway. They recently tried banning imports of foreign-made routers and that didn't seem to actually work out.

They already preemptively had CXMT on the trade blacklist lol. Only got removed because of the intense shortage.

don’t worry I can import an euro car bloated with chinese rams everywhere. a win-win

That's true, but after that point the capacity is there and it will be harder to constrain supply in this way after that. After China establishes a major memory player, I assume they wouldn't want to fall behind after that point either.