Resilience is a good thing. We’ve learnt that over the past two decades or so — pandemics, wars, trade decoupling and climate-related disasters have made the risks of over-concentrating production capacity in any one place apparent.
That’s why I’ve always believed it to be a good thing to have more regional nodes of critical goods manufacturing around the world. It’s not about ideology. It’s just about not keeping all your eggs in one basket.
But to create resilience, you need to play both offence and defence. The Trump administration is trying to do the latter with tariffs in a way that is incoherent, at best. But even if its tariff strategy were surgical (right now, we have blanket tariffs on high- and low-value parts of the economy alike, and proposals that shift by the day), it would fail without a home game that includes industrial policy to bolster truly strategic industries. Only countries that have both, and connect them clearly, can successfully boost domestic manufacturing.