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
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Notes -
To join some of the other replies here, I would contend that allowing random revanchist tendencies to go unchecked would actually make it much harder to fix the West when economies go into the crapper, because wars of annexation tend to be pretty bad on a world of global trade (military border control being a damper on international movement of goods and money). Now, it is possible to head towards law-and-order without the backdrop of a strong economy, but the West has generally been about not resembling the countries that do so for quite a while now.
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