There are valid reasons for tariffs:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good
Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-confronting-chinas-d...
But none of the current "reasons"—which may simply be rationalizations / retcons by underlings for one man's fickle will—really make much sense:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-for-tariffs-...
Except tarrifs rarely help any of that: there's already extensive regulations in place to require local sourcing for defence critical components, all the way down the supply chain.
And tarriffing imports doesn't make a difference in the case of something like shipbuilding where the real problem is the government hasn't got a consistent order-book to keep factories staffed, operating and training - nor a plan to allow that capacity to leverage into being self supporting.
Like a much better plan has always been defence exports: increase your customer base to spread risk and reduce per unit prices. The F-35 and it's adoption was a great idea in this regard...right up till the US started threatening NATO allies and cutting off avionics support to partner nations (Ukraine) in the middle of a war.
You don't get a defence manufacturing industry without actually paying for a defence manufacturing industry. The whole "bring manufacturing back" idea is almost wholly disconnected from it: a ton of factories extruding plastic childrens roys aren't suddenly going to start making anti-shipping missiles - in fact this is related to a secondary problem which is that it's not remotely clear that a peer/near-peer conflict would look anything like the long wars that WW2 represented due tot he delivery timelines on advanced weapons systems. You basically go to war with the military you have.
> You basically go to war with the military you have.
The war in Ukraine shows what a current-day war looks like: You rapidly expend stockpiled traditional weapons, and then rapidly ramp up low-cost drone manufacturing.
Currently, the #1 drone manufacturer in the world is probably Ukraine, with Russia and China somewhere in the #2 and #3 spots. The United States is somewhere on the bottom of that list.
Subsidising civilian drone manufacturing alone would catch up the United States dual-use manufacturing capability for any potential future war for the next half-a-decade or so. After that...? Something-something-AI-murder-bots.
But Ukraine built that industry after the war started. And the Ukranian conflict is uniquely well suited to drones because of numerous factors which wouldn't apply in say, a fight over Taiwan - where the outcome would more or less be determined by who still had a floating Navy at the end of the day.
No amount of 3D printed FPVs is going to bring down a modern warship - they're unlikely to even get near it (conversely the sea drone threat is enormous - but those aren't civilian assets in anyway, but can be as cheap as "brick on a speed boat throttle").
"the sea drone threat is enormous - but those aren't civilian assets"
Absolutely. Ukraine was able to push Russian surface fleet into Russian ports using sea drones. If Taiwan builds a fleet thereof, the Chinese blockade fleet will face Armageddon.
I saw an interview with a former naval radar guy, who claimed that the natural state of the sea produces so many small false blips that a smartly built sea drone of certain size is basically impossible to distinguish from those.
> built that industry after the war started.
Because for the first year of the war was the "burn down existing cold war era stocks" phase. More importantly, neither side realised the impact that drones would have.
Now that every military has seen years of video clips on Telegram of tank after tank being blown up by $500 drones, the next war is going start with swarms of drones on day 1, not day 400.
"More importantly, neither side realised the impact that drones would have."
The Ukrainians absolutely realized that, and I saw a lot of reports about Ukrainian drone operators in 2022 already. It was just after the Nagorno-Karabakh war, where Turkish-made drones were a significant factor in Azeri victory.
There was something else at play. The supply chain had to be built up, plus the Russians were/are quite strong at radioelectronic warfare. Overcoming Russian jamming was a serious uphill battle.
> Except tarrifs rarely help any of that: there's already extensive regulations in place to require local sourcing for defence critical components, all the way down the supply chain.
This is too limited in thinking. It's not just about "defence critical components", but the know-how and having the production workflow knowledge. It's all well and good to have rules on what goes into frigate, but if you don't have the shipyards to build things then it's a bit of a moot point:
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-confronting-chinas-d...
> You don't get a defence manufacturing industry without actually paying for a defence manufacturing industry.
It's not just about industry but about capacity as well: if you have (in this example) only (say) 4 shipyards you're going to have a tough time beating someone who has 40.
This is presuming you get to keep the shipyards. They're no use to you if they're all blown to hell in the first 48 hours - ships take months to build at minimum. If you lose your navy in the mean time, you won't be building anything.
This is the problem with these assumptions: they're all rooted in the industrial warfare the US won in WW2 but are not contextually accurate to today. WW2 wasn't fought with satellite targeting and precision cruise missiles which could be fired from half the planet away. Ukraine is currently hitting targets on the other side of Russia - "behind the lines" doesn't really exist for strategic assets anymore.
Giving up your economy for a future war with China that may or may not happen is frankly idiotic. The US already has thousands of nuclear warheads in storage so what are you afraid of? This is basically how the USSR collapsed.
> you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms.
The analysis is reasonable, but let's just replace "defending your freedoms" with "reaping the benefits of being the biggest bully in town". This is what China's competition means, not the risk of being attacked and losing your freedoms, but that of losing the power you got used to and profited from.
> The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future
People were worrying about this as early as the 1970s when Japan started importing cars, and in the 1990s when Chinese markets started to open up under the condition that the Western companies partner with Chinese ones and effectuate technology transfers to them. These folks foresaw the future, but politicians and corporate managers didn’t care; they were focused on expansion at all costs.
Now that the future is today, all they can say is “I told you so,” which isn’t much comfort to anyone.
I think we need to also consider that "conventional economic thinking" got us into this mess (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit). There never seems to be any accountability for this though. I suspect it's because a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo.
> (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit).
The debt/deficit is on politicians (and the public who votes them in). See also issues with US Social Security (Canada was on a similar path, but the government(s) sorted things out in the 1990s).
At least for the US, it has not de-industrialized, as exports have never been higher. It makes a smaller portion of total GDP, but that's because of growth of other sectors; and a smaller portion of the workforce, but that's because of automation:
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/do-not-blame-trade-decline-man...
The largest problem nowadays is probably housing costs, and that has nothing to do with trade, but is about things like NIMBY and zoning.
If you want more than "a particular section of society" and more folks to benefit look into redistribution, which plenty of conventional economists will happily agree with.
> a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo
Name me a country where this is not the case. The only thing we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation. That and failed to protect our democracy.
> we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation
What education did we give them to prosper as an industrialized nation? It seems to me that the population was able to discover that and benefit from it entirely on their own. Why do they need "education" to "prosper" in current conditions?
Aren't we currently living in the most educated time already? That is we have more people going to and graduating from college than ever before. What is currently missing? Do we need to force everyone to go to college? What about those who don't graduate? They just won't ever be able to prosper?
> That and failed to protect our democracy.
I think a little more than half the country would disagree with this assessment.
> What education did we give them to prosper as an industrialized nation?
That's an odd question, given that Prussian schooling was invented to turn children into productive factory workers.
The model and the curriculum are two separate things and our schools never included industrial education. That and our higher education is far less "vocational" than the countries that more strictly adhered to the system.
There's nothing odd about the question. What's odd is that you assert that conditions 200 years ago are relevant to it.
I think we've promoted little else besides de-industrialized degrees. That's why it's going to be so hard to ramp up again. How many kids think it's cool to get a textile engineering or materials science degree vs marketing or software engineering?
The US didn't have a de-industrialized or vulnerable economy before Trump. And by the extent it was hollowed out, it's because of blatant corruption, not "conventional economic thinking".
You don't even have a point about the deficit. While there are plenty of economic schools that will give you high deficits, the US didn't get his by following any of those either.