Industrial policy has been a frequent subject on Smith's blog, for those who don't follow it. (He's for it, and thinks that Biden's industrial policy was mostly good - it's worth following the links in this post.) This post focuses on defense-related geopolitical industrial policy goals and pros and cons of anticipated changes under the incoming Trump administration and Chinese responses. Particularly, he highlights two major things China can do: Restrict exports of raw materials (recently announced) and use their own industrial policy to hamper the West's peacetime industrial policy (de facto policy of the last 30 years). These are not extraordinary insights, but it's a good primer on the current state of affairs and policies to pay attention to in the near-future.
Noah Smith: Manufacturing is a war now
noahpinion.blog
- 102
- 10
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I fully agree but we need to first fix the leadership problem before getting into the specifics of damage control.
Why is China now the world capital of industry? Because we let them build up earlier as opposed to hammering them back when they were weak. It would've been so much easier to constrain their semiconductor industry 20 years ago. It would've been so much easier to stop them moving into the South China Sea before they put down all these airbases and artificial islands. It would've been so much easier to choke off their strategic industries when ours were bigger. It would've been so much easier to maintain military superiority if we weren't fighting stupid, expensive and pointless wars in MENA.
The US actually sabotaged and suppressed Taiwan's nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. Twice! Now it's far too late to put nukes there, the Chinese would go in before they could be set up.
Our strategy has been to appease China when they were weak and harass them now that they're strong. This is not wise.
Why has all this happened? The people at the helm have been arrogant fools. Biden laughed at the notion of a Russo-Sino-Iranian compact back in 1997, when there were so many ways we could've headed this off with lower costs and risks: https://x.com/SonjaEnde/status/1649318054969462788
Bill Clinton went 'oh the Chinese are trying to censor the internet, that's like nailing Jell-O to the wall!'. He was wrong. Censoring the internet is easy and desirable for any state, as we now understand.
Unless we get rid of all the arrogant fools from high office, there's no chance of success. They'll hector India for being too fascist, they'll open up yet another Middle East sideshow, they'll constantly cancel every naval procurement program so that billions are spent and no capabilities produced, they'll let in all these Chinese nationals to leading AI companies (and the military), they'll squander wealth on green technology, they'll DEI meritocracy away. They will find ways to blunder that we can't even imagine!
Even today people are going on TV saying '400% tarriffs! Let's bring Beijing to its knees': https://www.newsweek.com/kevin-oleary-donald-trump-tariffs-china-defcon-1-1992284
People like this are so stupid, it's laughable. That's not how tarriffs work and it misjudges the balance of economic power. But they are running the show, the lesson still hasn't been learnt.
You can easily access dissident material in China and most internet-literate Chinese could do so by VPN even with the crude blocking implemented as part of the great firewall. Chinese don’t do so not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to. The US should implement a similar policy of making socially deleterious messaging (like much of TikTok) hard to access for plebs, but easy for anyone with a modicum of intelligence.
China is a largely functioning, largely peaceful society. Democracy has nothing to offer them, countless genuine democracies in Asia, Africa and the Americas are complete shitholes with a much lower quality of life than China.
The Chinese don’t desire control of the world. They never have, it’s not in their genes. They want their little slice of East Asia, they don’t even really want Japan and are semi-ambivalent on Korea. They want to control the SCS, which is reasonable for the world’s second power given the US controls oceans and waterways many times further away from North America than the furthest extreme of the nine dash line is from mainland China.
As far as AI and related tech goes, they’ll have it anyway, it’s way too easy to steal cloud compute and divert GPU shipments and - even if it wasn’t - the Chinese could still just tune and run the models after they were created. The US needs peace with China, a 50 year plan to hand over Taiwan to the CCP in a negotiated fashion (OR a commitment by the Taiwanese that they’re prepared to fight this themselves, which they are not) and some kind of pathway to a settlement around the nine-dash that either extracts significant concessions from Southeast Asian allies or cedes the space to China in the interests of peace.
You know that for like two millennia China had a policy of "no equals, only tributaries and rebels", right? That's a large part of why the Opium Wars happened; Qing China insisted that it wouldn't treat the Western powers as sovereign nations - there were to be no negotiations, only tribute, acknowledging the Emperor as their feudal overlord, and begging him for magnanimity - and while the Dutch played along with the farce, the Empire on which the Sun Never Sets said "fuck that" and kicked over the anthill.
And the core tenet of the CPC's legitimacy is that that pratfall was a terrible injustice and that it will bring China back to the glory that preceded it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link