Promote ‘free trade’ all through the 1980s-90s so your manufacturing base goes to Asia. All your chips/semiconductors are built in Taiwan. Top guys get rich, middle America eviscerated. Then promote war if China invades Taiwan to protect ‘investment,’ send middle America to die..

…it would be easier, cheaper over the long run, and it wouldn’t risk so many lives just to build some plants here. Doesn’t even have to be all plants, but just some, so that we don’t have to saber-rattle to defend stupid decisions that were based on short-term financial gain.

There is just an utterly perverse logic at play here. Make ourselves vulnerable in various aspects of supply chain so we have to threaten war to protect it, rather than just have strategic industrial depth…

…and all the while strip many Americans of a basic dignified livelihood, and plan to send them overseas as cannon fodder later on to protect a system that immiserated them in the first place. We could just build factories in Wisconsin and Arizona and pay Americans instead.

Post script - this all started under the GOP’s patron saint Ronald Reagan. Not many stress this, that he started the process of selling Americans out. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher did the same thing - which Theodore Dalrymple has repeatedly pointed out over the years.