> When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate is really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII happens?
I'm not buying that whole argument. At all. Because this looks too much like a "lets find favorable talking points for the middling plans we already put in motion"-exercise.
Can you honestly argue that current economic policy and decisionmaking was mainly driven by strategic military interests and planning, as opposed to Trump being a big fan of tariffs as a concept?
Because I don't think you can. And I think we don't need more than a glance at the liberation day proposals to identify this; if the aim was to war-proof US supply chains, then you would expect a big focus on military relevance of tariffed goods, coupled with long term investments into defense-relevant local industry and a glut of defense-spending in general.
Instead we got blanket tariffs that were so ill-conceived, they mostly had to be rolled back/suspended the next day, and generally pretty much no apparent guiding focus or much thought at all.
Concerning possible war: Russia is not a credible military opponent to the US and is not gonna be one within decades, either. Their land army basically got stopped by a country a fifth of their size on mainly donated (and frequently old) western equipment, and the Russian Navy embarassed itself even worse.
China is a somewhat credible opponent, but what would they even go to war over that would actually affect the US? Panama? They might be more serious about taking Taiwan back, but I honestly doubt that the US would involve itself in that business too much anyway; considering how the whole support for the Ukraine, whose territorial integrity it formally agreed on to protect, amounted to some military hand-me-downs and a bit of intel sharing (no longer even that from what I know?), I would NOT hold my breath waiting for US carriers in a Taiwan invasion...
