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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7628 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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What is "adversary-proof production"? What does it look like? What policies achieve that end state or detract from it?

This has been on my mind for a while. It comes up regularly in discussions concerning international trade, tariffs and other trade policy, manufacturing, agriculture, defense, and geopolitics. I've joked about it before:

North Korea now "produces" its own airplanes. Which I guess is cool if you want to make sure that you have whatever metric of "adversary-proof" (I'm not convinced it actually is, but it depends highly on the metric you use) and if you're okay with only being able to produce what are essentially copies of extremely old Cessnas. Maybe in 50 years, they'll be able to produce their own WWII-era fighter jets, which I guess is "adversary-proof" to one metric, but probably not all that "adversary-proof" according to other metrics.

I remarked in that comment that I was kind of joking, but only kind of. I think it really is that I just actually don't know what "adversary-proof production" actually means. I don't think I have a set of criteria to go check whether or to what extent a country's production is adversary-proof. Thus, I don't think I have a way of determining whether any particular policy proposal would or would not contribute toward that goal.

With this context, one of my various aggregators linked to this tweet:

Rice prices have exploded in Japan. The country goes grows about 99% of the rice it consumes, a condition approaching autarky, because of a lattice of subsidies, political influence and protectionism, which all make the market incredibly vulnerable to shocks.

The tweet includes a price chart. I checked reasonably quickly to make sure it wasn't totally off the wall and found articles like this. Apparently, there are a bunch of subsidies/market controls on the domestic production of rice in Japan. Moreover, there is only a very small amount of imported rice allowed without tariffs. The result is that the vast vast majority of Japanese-consumed rice is grown in Japan. There are very few companies that have established any sort of importation supply chain, no relations with international producers, no pre-existing options deals, no experience with the logistics of importing.

And thus, because of some supply (and possibly some demand) factors (one might quibble with the details here, and it seems like different authors point to similar buy slightly different details; I don't think it matters too much), the price of rice in Japan has skyrocketed. One might not worry too much, though. The government is here to help. They have a strategic stockpile of rice! (What a thing for a government to choose to do, have the expertise to manage, etc.) Which they've opened, and only slightly pushed prices a bit.

If you can't tell, I am sympathetic to the view of the tweet author. I don't think that what "adversary-proof production" means is that you shut out international trade, regulate production in order to make sure you preserve some sense of what you think the domestic market "should" look like, and have almost the entirety of your production be domestic.

...but that still leaves me wanting to know... what is "adversary-proof production"? What does it actually look like? I tried my typical strategy of hopping over to google scholar to see if I could find some academic writing on the topic, but perhaps they just use different key terminology, and I'm missing it. Can TheMotte help? Any academic work? Or even your home-grown (autarkic?) definition?

Here's my home-grown definition - defense treaties like NATO also need to include some economic provisions that ensure that every aspect of wartime production is covered by at least one of the member states. It's shameful that the NATO countries together cannot produce sufficient rare earth materials to supply our collective armies. Within member states, there should be enough capability to grow sufficient food, mine sufficient materials, process sufficient materials, produce sufficient sources of energy, etc so that if NATO countries went to war with a major adversary it could do so without pagers exploding or power grids being kill-switched.

"Adversary-proof production" doesn't mean Isolated America vs the World. It would mean blocks of allies against at least one adversary. There can be market competition between allies.

It's also helpful to remember that in the case of actual wartime production happening even the less-competitive producers will likely be going full-tilt.

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