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
- 9
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm a believer in de-escalating tensions with China. Their political system repulses me, but what is more likely to bring freedom to the people who are oppressed in their system, escalating tensions with the US or de-escalated ones? Many people were repulsed by Russian czarism in 1917, but when that system fell it was replaced by a vastly more brutal one. We don't necessarily need to fight. Why not try to be friends instead, at least as much as possible? This all doesn't necessarily have to be a zero sum game. Maybe we can all win. At the end of the day, I don't care much about the US economic success versus China at all, for me this geopolitical question is one that should be decided on moral grounds. How can we help China to liberalize, to become at least more like modern Japan or South Korea in the sense that they have at least some sort of functional democracy and civil liberties for people, with a limited amount of people going to jail just because the government doesn't like them. I feel like there are probably better ways to try to bring about that outcome than pure video game style strategic considerations of resources and tariffs and so on. The Chinese people, like Russians, are fundamentally somewhat poor biomass when it comes to liberalism... the average person of both ethnic groups is just fundamentally inferior to the average Westerner when it comes to liberalism, they might tend to not understand the benefit of it on a fundamental psychological level. But how to improve the biomass, is the question. I don't think that Russians or Chinese are fundamentally genetically incapable of liberalism, I doubt that it goes as deep as that. I always come back to thinking about how the Germans went from a backwater that probably didn't know that the Earth was round, 2000 years ago, to being the world's leaders in science about 1700 years later. How can we help the Chinese to make that happen? To turn them into nice people who don't necessarily want to conquer the world and oppress others, at least not any more than the modern West wants it (which is substantial, but at least we're not back in pure colonialism mode)?
Well, in the case of Japan and South Korea (and West Germany), we accomplished that by way of "benevolent" military occupation, for which hot war is a prerequisite. Have any other historical examples for us to consider?
More options
Context Copy link
The only likely ways for the CPC to fall are:
They took steps to ensure they wouldn't wind up liberalising like the Soviet sphere or Taiwan or South Korea, and those steps work. You need something huge. Note that the CPC knows about #2, which means it won't co-operate easily; this threat (if made with the will and unquestioned ability to follow through) might get them to cave in, and military defeats of course don't have to be consensual, but that's about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link