The statistic I posted above excludes factor services (i.e. capital flows including dividends like you describe above) and things like salary remission. See the metadata definition (this took me forever to navigate because it kept crashing my browsers - worst performing site ever, sorry)

I think that we cannot just measure goods anymore like in the 60s. In 2023, digital service exports alone netted over 600bn for the US - a significant portion of US exports. Those are not shady investments but actually deliver great value. We cannot ignore that. Most organizations I've worked with outside of the US use AWS, Azure and/or Oracle Cloud. Also if they have otherwise fully domestic supply chains, simply because there aren't real contenders. I've directly seen this evolve starting around 2014 in EMEA, LatAm and even APAC - despite Alibaba competition - first hand. Hundreds of thousands of people are employed in these businesses, and they're extremely profitable.

If you want to compare nation states, the apples-to-apples comparison is to exclude as little as possible.