Reducing reliance on others is primarily risk mitigation, which is increasingly perceived as necessary due to the rise of authoritarianism and wars, in western

Reducing reliance on others is primarily risk mitigation, which is increasingly perceived as necessary due to the rise of authoritarianism and wars, in western democracies at least. However, it is quite a sub-optimal solution, and in some cases very costly or close to impossible. It will almost always reduce economic growth, sometimes quite severely. It would be in the best interests of any one country or group of countries to not have the threats which we think we must de-risk in the first place. Free trade was the primary way we thought we could do that, or at least Europeans thought that was the way. We were wrong all these years. I admit I was one of them. I thought at some point in the near future we would collectively move past this thing called warfare. How naive.