Washington Monthly - Manufacturing and Liberty
Executive director Barry Lynn publishes an explanatory article in the Washington Monthly on supply chains within the Biden Administration’s international policies and chokepoint strategy.
What a glorious moment it seemed, the mid-1990s. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and peoples around the world were embracing American-style liberal democracy and capitalism. Better yet, America was a hegemon with no need ever to twist another arm. Economists had begun to speak of a revolutionary new approach to managing power. Three great natural forces—globalization, digitization, the market itself—were remaking the world for us, by destroying all antidemocratic concentrations of political and economic control.
The business corporation, we were told, was melting away. America was becoming a nation of “free agents” able to work with whoever we wanted, bound by little more than a gossamer-thin net of contracts. At the social level, this meant no more need for regulation of business, or for checks and balances between the state and private enterprise. Give free rein to these forces, and they would evolve the economy all but automatically toward a world characterized by, as Robert Reich wrote in The Work of Nations, the “diffusion of ownership and control” within a “global web.”
More radical yet, the nation-state itself was vanishing into the mists of history. The 1980s had been a decade of alarms about new Soviet arms systems, and how Japanese and Germany industry threatened U.S. factories and jobs. Then suddenly these worries vanished. Deep industrial interdependence, we were assured, was tying the people of the world into a single borderless economic community, which would ensure not just mutual prosperity but peace on Earth. As a book titled The Pentagon’s New Map put it, the world had a new “operating theory” in which “connectivity” would “trump” all the old tensions and rivalries. Indeed, within “globalization’s Functioning Core” of industrialized nations, armed conflict had already become impossible.
So for a quarter century we cruised, with hardly a thought about how and where the goods, foods, and drugs on which we depend were made, grown, and traded. Sure, there were a few glitches in the new global matrix—September 11th, the Lehman crash of 2008. But on we went, largely heedless of how the capitalists were using their corporations to concentrate control over factories and foundries and chemical plants, and were then shifting these capacities to the far side of the ocean in ways that destroyed far more than jobs. Even when Donald Trump howled the words “America First,” most college-educated liberals dismissed the idea as silly—just angry white racists, pining for a moment that efficiency and social progress had rendered obsolete. Soil and grease under our nails? Ha! Fingers were for summonsing Ubers and pushing “buy” buttons.
Well, the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s blockade of Taiwan have slapped us awake. And what we see is terrifying. Just in the past three years we have found ourselves suddenly without face masks to protect against a pandemic, without the chemicals we need to test for viruses, without container ship and rail capacity to move basic goods, without semiconductors to build airplanes and medical devices, without formula to feed babies, without natural gas, and with roaring inflation in almost every sector of the economy. Worse, we’ve realized that it’s not hard to imagine far more catastrophic industrial crashes, and, indeed, the White House recently warned that a conflict in Asia could cause $2.5 trillion in damages the first year alone. Rather than harmonious interdependence among peoples we may soon be forced to choose between dependence on autocratic regimes and wider war.
Read full article here.