Are manufacturing jobs moving east or were US wages inflated for four decades

There is a continuous stream of noise in the media about jobs moving east, and about the negative impact of globalization. In my discussions with an old friend Dave Wilson we came up with a contrarian view.
After World War II, the infrastructure in Europe and Japan were in shambles, the population losses sustained in Europe and Japan were orders of magnitude more than those sustained in the US, and the Asian and African economies were still primarily underdeveloped. This automatically led to the US being the only country ready to be the "factory" of the world. And since the other economies had not developed/redeveloped their infrastructure fully, the competition to the US was negligible. Hence the semi-skilled and unskilled labour could negotiate high wages, since the products could sell at artificially high prices.

By the 70s and 80s, many other regions in the world had infrastructure to support manufacturing economies, and the natural forces of market economy took over. Hence the current 20 -30 year trend of rationalisation of wages and cost looks like a job migration. But in reality it is just that it took 30-40 years for the rest of the world to play catch up.

I know this is an over simplification, but is this a plausible explanation?