> ... allowing the Coast Guard to buy icebreakers from Finland would likely save over a billion dollars per ship, as well as years of construction time
How about we let Finland build the icebreakers, and we build something we're good at, like fighter planes? Then everyone gets the best and most efficiently built icebreakers and fighter planes, and all for much less money.
There is no [edit: economic] logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people.
> There is no logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people.
It doesn’t have to be that way, and phrased a little more benevolent, economic sovereignty is a good thing. It’s for that reason the EU has invested a lot of money into Galileo instead of just using GPS. Or look at the Ariane rocket program. It mandates an absurdly complex manufacturing schedule with thousands of European companies, effectively costing a lot more than just relying on SpaceX. At the same time, though, it creates a lot of jobs and distributes wealth throughout the union.
Embezzling is a problem, and politicians funneling money to their cronies too. But it can be done differently.
Having your own manufacturing and industrial base is also very, very important from a geopolitical perspective. (as european countries have come to realise after the invasion of ukraine).
you need your own industrial base to manufacture and develop the machinery you need to defend and project hard and soft power across the globe. Globalisation was supposed to
"solve this issue" by making economies so interconnected that this would be no longer needed.
Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up.
> Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up.
We've learned that the world now is more divided and violent than we had hoped, with the revisionist Chinese and Russians on one side and the US Republicans on the other (or sometimes on the same side as Russia!) So we depend more on the military, and also we can't depend on China's manufacturing to supply military goods.
But can the US depend on Europe's, South Korea's, Japan's, Canada's, Australia's? I think so.
Also, efficiency is everything in the competition with China: China, with ~ 4x the population of the US, can outproduce the US with just over 1/4 of the US's productivity. The US must maximize not only volume but productivity. Adding the countries listed above greatly increases volume, and the US can't afford the productivity cost of spending on inefficient manufacturers - the US needs to maximize output per dollar.
I do think the US can depend on Europe, Canada and Mexico. South Korea, Japan, and Australia are far from the USA and close to China. They have high incentive stay friendly with China.
I do think China can easily outproduce the US. But I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it. Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
The status quo can't be maintained, that's for sure.
> South Korea, Japan, and Australia are far from the USA and close to China. They have high incentive stay friendly with China.
While that was to some degree a concern years ago, before Biden took office, those countries have decisively and openly taken sides with the US and are members of a network of alliances that also includes The Philipines and, to a degree, India. The US has been building and improving bases, military training, etc. in and with those countries and all over the region For example, there is AUKUS, a major agreement between the US, Australia, and also the UK, for Australia to become the only country outside the UK to receive one of the US crown jewels, nuclear submarine technology. Australia also is hosting an expanding number of US bases.
> I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it.
The economics is trickier than that: Production is real economic value; printing money is just a statistic. Productivity = output/dollars. If you increase the dollars in that equation, you don't change the output and you reduce the nominal productivity number (though usually it's measured using inflation-adjusted dollars, so it's really unchanged).
The US can increase output by borrowing more dollars, increasing the volume of investment in shipyards without increasing productivity. But borrowing does cost something - IIRC the debt payments will soon exceed the military budget - and can cause inflation, which eventually negatively impacts output. In the end, China may be able to invest far more.
> Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
> But can the US depend on Europe's, South Korea's, Japan's, Canada's, Australia's? I think so.
If our goal is to be robust against the risks of a great power conflict, we can't necessarily depend on manufacturing from these countries because a great power conflict might either overrun or cut off our supply lines to these countries. In fact, control over East Asian shipping lanes is the central point of the current cold war with China.
I agree there is some risk for the East Asian countries. I think China would be hard pressed to stop all that production and trade, but certainly they could impact it and who can say what a 21st century war would look like?
Still, it's a risk, not a deal killer. China could bomb US production too.
China can't bomb American production unless we suffer absolutely catastrophic, unimaginable, WW3-escalatory levels of naval losses in the Pacific (because Chinese bombers from the Chinese mainland don't have the range to reach the American mainland).
I'm not sure that's true. The US can't defend an entire Pacific front, obviously, and has a shortage of ships, many of which will be busy doing other things.
Anyway, I was thinking of missiles, which China has many of, and which can reach the US (including from submarines and other ships that can maneuver closer to the US).
There is close to zero escalation room between Chinese missile strikes on the US mainland and nuclear war. If we detect incoming missiles from China there’s a good chance the US assumes nuclear warheads and makes a retaliatory strike.
That’s a real risk, but because neither side of a conflict wants to actually escalate to a nuclear exchange, it is not very likely that China will launch missiles at the mainland US. (Likewise I think the US is unlikely to strike mainland China.)
Conversely, whichever side maintains naval superiority in the western Pacific Ocean can cut off any supply chains to and from Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and mainland China itself, without the risk of nuclear escalation. And as I stated, this is the entire issue. If you control the seas of East Asia, you basically control the world.
If you're measuring in decades, can you take any alliance for granted? Things can change in unpredictable ways.
Taking Europe as an example, if Trump or someone like him decides to leave Europe to its own devices while facing an aggressive Russia, we could see massive re-militarization. Who can say where a shift like this would lead? It's easy to view these countries as permanent allies when they depend on us for security, but they might not be so cooperative once they can stand up for themselves militarily.
This applies to Japan and South Korea as well vis a vis China/NK.
NATO, as well as the rest of the Atlantic relationships that form the 'West', has worked very well for 90 years, and NATO is still growing and strengthening.
Anything can happen, but that's not rational. Rationally, we need to anticipate what is likely and not treat risk as if it's all random, coin-flip, unpredictable chaos.
I agree; I meant that we need to rationally assess what outcomes are more likely and plan according to that, not treat every outcome as equally likely.
And not only plan, as if we are passive victims of history, but make it happen - invest in NATO, etc.
Sure, but assuming we remain a democracy, or some approximation of one, we're always going to be a bit schizophrenic in our policies. Any particular administration can try to go in one direction or the other, but they have to be aware that their successor (or the one after) could very well undo all their actions and take the exact opposite course.
So in terms of long term planning, I think hedging our bets make sense. It might be a good idea to invest in NATO, but we also don't want to be left in a highly vulnerable position in 10-20 years if NATO falls apart and our current allies stop giving us free trade agreements, because that's a real possibility.
I won't keep going in circles, but focus on this point:
> Sure, but assuming we remain a democracy, or some approximation of one, we're always going to be a bit schizophrenic in our policies. Any particular administration can try to go in one direction or the other, but they have to be aware that their successor (or the one after) could very well undo all their actions and take the exact opposite course.
The idea that democracies are less stable and predictable doesn't bear out in reality. They are the most stable and predictable forms of government, because they have many checks on their power: Free press, legislatures, competitive elections, etc. expose fraud and incompetence to their disinfectent, sunlight. The rule of law means that officials serve the law and the people, not a person. Putin is not someone you trust to keep their word in a deal with you.
Government by dictators is less stable: They lack the essential things above, and are subject to one person's whim - a person inevitably corrupted by their power. They change power through violence, which makes them even more unstable.
And to circle back after all to the evidence right in front of us: NATO has lasted 90 years so far. The US has greatly expanded and deepened its alliances in East Asia over the last 4 years. Now name an ally China or Russia has. They don't - dictators don't have allies on that level; nobody actually likes their values and wants them to succeed. China and Russia's current relationship is nothing like the US's with NATO;
When you do stupid and unpredictable things? Certainly. But that seems like an internal US problem. Of choice rebuilding local manufacturing might be easier than fixing that in theory. OTH the longterm cost would like be much higher due to lower global stability.
The US doesn't have too much trouble manufacturing things like aircraft carriers and submarines and 5th-gen fighter jets and missiles, and indeed builds plenty of those, even exporting some. It does have trouble building an icebreaker, but it doesn't need those very often, so it can't keep any company interested in the business when it only wants one every ~30 years or whatever. It doesn't make sense to spend a ton of money just to build one ship, when they can just buy it from Finland.
FWIW, the US does have problems producing ships. For example, the US military and Congress very much want to increase the rate of submarine production, and haven't been able to do it. If you look at current news, you can see the desperate measures they are pursuing.
> It doesn’t have to be that way, and phrased a little more benevolent, economic sovereignty is a good thing. It’s for that reason the EU has invested a lot of money into Galileo instead of just using GPS. Or look at the Ariane rocket program.
You haven't established that it's a 'good thing', but it does exist. I don't suppose Galileo is about economic sovereignty as much as strategic military independence. Modern militaries require satellite PNT systems - they are necessary to precision munitions, without which your military operates on a 1980s level. As close as the EU-US military relationship is, they perhaps don't want to give the POTUS a button to shut down, e.g., a French military operation. The POTUS might like Galileo too - they might not want the pressure to use that power. (I'll skip having another HN SpaceX discussion!)
> it creates a lot of jobs and distributes wealth throughout the union
Or it just shifts money and jobs from all people - the taxpayers (including businesses) - to a few, the ones that get those jobs and especially the business owners. It's arguably better to just give people the money and have them do something they can do efficiently. It's make-work welfare, in a way.
The point I was trying to make was that keeping the technological manufacturing expertise alive is valuable in itself, even besides the geopolitical advantage of having the system itself in place. By retaining the ability to get payloads into space and use as well as operate an independent positioning system, even if a political conflict with former partners arises, the EU can make its foreign policy decisions without fear of retaliation through technology dependencies—or phrased differently, we avoid being vulnerable to extortion.
The key to this ability really is to keep the knowledge alive and the related industries strong, to be able to tap into it when it's necessary. And that involves having a broad range of companies actively involved into creating critical components.
Given the close economic and cultural ties of these countries, surely some kind of knowledge transfer could happen, if not actual nearshoring the construction. Could NAFTA (or whatever it's called now) be used to get around the Jones Act somehow?
It's amazing how hard communication can be! My simple sentence, "Finland is a NATO ally; but sure Canada makes sense too." has three interpretations - all reasonable IMHO:
1. cgh's: 'Finland is ok because they are in NATO; Canada, who in contrast are not in NATO, also makes sense.'
2. yours: 'Finland is an ally of NATO, not a member.'
3. mine: 'Canada may have 'close economic and cultural ties' (from the parent comment), but Finland is a member of the NATO alliance. Canada still makes sense (no comment on their NATO membership, which is a fact).'
I think some is context: In what I read, 'NATO ally' is a somewhat common term for members of NATO (an alliance, of course), and I instinctively used it. It's hard to remember that other people read their own materials.
My mistake, sorry. I thought you were implying Canada wasn't a NATO member.
I agree with your economic nationalism comments. But Canada is in a special position here: the US Arctic is contiguous with Canada's much larger Arctic region and a US/Canada icebreaking partnership seems to make sense. The US nationalists might be okay with it because of NAFTA, generally close economic ties and the whole "fortress North America" thing. Canada has at least two shipyards capable of building icebreakers and the US has money.
> The US nationalists might be okay with it because of NAFTA
Why are nationalists ok with NAFTA, which is just like any other international fre trade agreement? Is it because Trump backed it - meaning, of course, that they aren't nationalists but Trumpists.
I've always heard people say nationalism is a good thing and globalism is the solution, yet they never have an answer to what do you do when China controls every supply chain and then decides to bulldoze Taiwan and we then go to war with them? All the market advantages and globalism in the world goes out the window and you can't do much more than capitulate to a bully.
> they never have an answer to what do you do when China controls every supply chain and then decides to bulldoze Taiwan and we then go to war with them? All the market advantages and globalism in the world goes out the window and you can't do much more than capitulate to a bully.
That was a complaint many years go, but things have changed dramatically: The US now is 'decoupling' its economy from China, and moving production to friendlier countries, and the US encourages and arranges for allies to do the same. The US and its Pacific allies are also intensely preparing for possible warfare with China.
Just because China is not a reliable partner doesn't mean the US should throw out all other partners. Should the US not buy icebreakers from Canada and Finland because of China? That would be greatly hamstrining the US. China's government would love it, I think.
The globalists, when it's time to go to war again. The same people who said you are a racist and fascist if you wave the flag have already done about face and now say it's the duty of young men and women to die for their country.
"Everybody for themselves, we're individuals" when there's peace and "We're all in this together, you've got to die for your country" when their wealth is threatened.
You have a point, IMHO, but it doesn't leave room for another group: Humanitarians who believe in human rights as fundamental. That is counter to nationalism (which says the 'nation' is fundemental - the nation being the nationalist powerbrokers); it assumes all have inalienable equal rights, regardless of where political borders are drawn.
Sometimes you need to get together and fight for human rights. But even as WWII was going on, Churchill, for example, was IIRC a harsh critic of nationalism.
Well, there is “a logic,” whether you agree with it or not, that it’s strategically important even if commercially suboptimal for us to have a domestic shipbuilding capability.
It is strategically critical to maintain friendly relations with Finland, Canada, and South Korea, all of which would be happy to sell icebreakers. If those countries were to become unreliable, the US will have problems a whole lot than a shortage of icebreakers.
Especially since Congress needed to allocate funds for the project anyway, just pass a law that says "buy some ice breakers from Finland, notwithstanding any other laws, and here's 1 billion dollars to do it."
"The culprit here isn’t the Jones Act, but another protectionist shipbuilding law that requires Naval and Coast Guard ships to be built in U.S. shipyards. It’s possible to waive this requirement via presidential authorization[0], but there hasn’t appeared to be much interest in this."
Yes, it’s tragic. Even if you consider the job losses. We’d be better off paying those same shipbuilders to do Sudoku puzzles, with HALF the money we save on the ships. A billion bucks per ship would go a LONG way.
I mean, ideally we could try to not suck at building ships economically, though. But that’s a lot harder to figure out given how it’s a political problem.
How about we let Finland build the icebreakers, and we build something we're good at, like fighter planes? Then everyone gets the best and most efficiently built icebreakers and fighter planes, and all for much less money.
There is no [edit: economic] logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people.