No. of Recommendations: 3
I'm not saying they're good guys. I'm saying it's a massive national security win for us if they're not firing shots.They're getting
us to fire shots via proxies. All the while playing the rest of the world. Is it
as bad? No, obviously. But not great.
One of the most significant national security threats to the United States - a real one - is the threat of nuclear weapons. China is one of the world's major nuclear powers, and one of only two nations that could actually substantially destroy the United States. A "hot war" involving China is one of the gravest threats to our country.But that has nothing to do with trade policy.
Nuclear weapons aren't battlefield in nature. They're political. Once the first nation launches a nuke for any reason the other will respond in kind.
We have manufacturing, but we can't do the type of labor-intensive low-value manufacturing at scale that would enable the critical product manufacturing that you want to be relocated here.That's right, we won't. The kind of truck-them-in-from-the-vil and line them up elbow to elbow manufacturing scheme that China employs won't work here. What we would do is handle it via automation and efficiency. Take steel:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUEN3311W20000...Employment today is less than half of what it was in 1990. However, steel production
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPN3311A2RS...has not decreased by that amount.
Those types of manufacturers can't be sustained in a vacuum. They need to cluster. They need to have access to vast pools of labor, other manufacturers who are making the parts and tools and components (and the tools and machinery that other manufacturers use to make the parts and components), and a transportation infrastructure capable of meeting their needs. And all those other firms and companies and actors can't come here if their only customers will be the specific "critical" manufacturers we deign to subsidize.And do you think these places don't exist in the United States? We don't have ports with rail lines and what not? We don't have the ability to move goods around from point A to point B?
One reason why Europe sucks at this and won't reach their potential is their lack of big trucks on the highway, intercontinental waterways and small electric trains. We have all 3 in a very flexible transportation/logistics setup in the US.
And we'd have to recreate all the public works and governmental projects that China spent the last several decades building - the roads and rails, the ports and shipping, the utility lines and power generation. Again, the government would have to do that (either directly or indirectly), because there's no market reason for any private actors to be doing any of that. You can't do it with tariffs.No one has said that tariffs will build more Hoover Dams.
I hate to break this to you, but the nation needs far more unsexy things like port and airport upgrades, power lines and power generation just to maintain our current levels of industrial outputs. All those AI data centers? They're not going to power themselves.
One of the biggest follies of the green movement was in failing to address the obvious increase in demand on the nation's power grid and infrastructure when you add millions more vehicles taking power from it.
