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-_-_-_-_-  13d ago (noahpinion.blog)   1801 thread views

Noah Smith: Manufacturing is a war now

noahpinion.blog

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.

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Give an inch, they take a mile. If you just let China take Taiwan with no fight because the war would be so costly, why would China stop there? Would you let them conquer every island in the Pacific until they have everything except Hawaii too?

Because they don’t want. China for much of the last 2000 years had insane state capacity, a centralized government and some of the most modern technology of the age, and yet its territorial expansion was highly restrained.

Lol. 'We conquered to our technological limits to afford and maintain a coherent empire that, bounded by the jungles and the himelayas and the steppe and ocean, was still one of the largest in the world' is not what most historical contexts would consider 'highly restrained' imperial conquest. The Chinese imperialists conquered what they could hold, extorted what they could not, and weren't aware of what else they could profitably do.

The Chinese empires of old certainly lost out on the expansionism of overseas colonization, but this was a result of oversight and court politics, not knowing alternative opportunities existed and choosing restraint out of virtue. The modern Chinese state generally consider this a mistake not to be repeated.

Great point, and great way of wording it

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