In his most recent Washington Post column, David Ignatius is worried about the risks of a fracturing of Chimerica:
The United States and China have an increasingly competitive relationship, but they need each other, too, like conjoined twins. Hasty attempts at separation could harm them both. Open research made U.S. technology great; making it more difficult for the best brains to live and work here would be folly.
I think he’s in clinical denial. It should have been obvious in 2010 when China imposed export quotas on rare earths but it has become absolutely undeniable during the COVID-19 lockdowns. We can’t afford to be dependent on China for strategic materials, pharmaceuticals, or food additives.
The question is no longer should we decouple from China but how should we manage the decoupling? I would propose that publicly traded companies be required to have alternative supply chains that don’t go through China at all. I’ve made other proposals from time to time but that should be enough to make a few heads explode.
IMO Mr. Ignatius’s preoccupation with artificial intelligence is truly baffling. IMO he’s overestimating its significance. When I was in grad school (which is now more than 50 years ago) AI was a grab bag of not particularly closely related strategies. That’s still the case and there have been very few new developments in AI over the last 50 years. What has happened is that hardware has gotten much cheaper. I was one of the few people who had a personal computer nearly 50 years ago. I built it from thrown away components I repaired. It occupied most of a good-sized bookshelf and it was several orders of magnitude less capable than the smartphone you now carry. A lot of that is presently dependent on China. That’s a risk we can’t live with.
He should be more worried about the decoupling in American society.
Decoupling won’t benefit American workers unless the companies are forced to bring the manufacturing back to the US. By forced I mean import embargoes and confiscatory taxation, to the point of destroying the companies importing manufactured goods from anywhere.
And Andy is right. The real American crisis, one that has the potential to actually destroy this country, are the armed insurrections in numerous cities being supported, if not led, by local Democrat politicians. These are true insurrections, with trained, armed, coordinated paramilitaries operating within the mobs, using the mobs as human shields. These are tactics worthy of the intifadas.
Some people may bristle at subsidies for American companies that agree to onshore
Production congress declares essential such as medicine but the truth is totally free markets don’t exist anywhere.
It would be more defensible IMO
Than subsidies for milk or corn which we’ve paid out for decades.
Sure, it would be ripe for abuse but that’s every program.
I would hope that congress sets up such subsidies quickly and quietly without barking at the Chinese and inviting retribution or shortages in critical goods.
But that’s probably too much to ask.