The benefits of it are almost entirely “resilience during wartime”. Economists tend not to consider war very much, because it is chaotic, tends to strike at ra

The benefits of it are almost entirely “resilience during wartime”. Economists tend not to consider war very much, because it is chaotic, tends to strike at random moments that are only loosely related to economic conditions, and involves people actively destroying productive capacity instead of building it up. But of war is a given, you can see some fairly obvious benefits of having critical supply chains entirely contained within your borders. There’s ample historical data to back that up too: Japan (with its energy supply chain almost entirely outside of its borders) was forced to embark on wars of conquest in the rest of Asia to secure its energy needs, while the U.S. (which at the time was both a large oil producer and a large manufacturer) could sit behind its oceans and only enter the war when Japan’s territorial ambitions collided with it. Likewise, if you take “WW3 is going to happen in the near future” as a given, almost all of the Trump administration’s actions make sense, from the crackdown on dissent to the effort to deport any foreign nationals to the saber rattling against Greeenland and Panama to “drill baby drill” to appeasement of Russia to the increased defense budget to the tariffs and efforts to bring semiconductor and drone supply chains stateside to the elimination of climate change programs. The strategy is very clearly to hole up between our two oceans and produce everything ourselves while the rest of the world destroys itself. Of course, you can’t say “WW3 is imminent” without making it significantly more likely and scarring your populace to boot, which creates some very strong information distortions and illogical actions.