> I'm saying it would be better to buy higher quality ships at a lower price from places like Japan or South Korea (who are very good at shipbuilding)
What the last ~3 years have taught us is that a country should not have critical dependencies on another country. The keywords for the first part of the 21st century will be Deglobalization and aging societies, better buckle up.
I don't think having 200+ individual autarkies is going to produce net benefits for humanity. Really, the once in a century pandemic is worth having the other 99 years of high efficiency supply chains.
I think people's opinions on this are largely divided over whether they think the current ~75 years of peace (more or less—cold war's not a hot war, and limited proxy wars aren't world wars) between major powers is likely to continue. The pandemic was a tiny fraction as disruptive as a major war would be, and we struggled to handle that—if one expects a higher frequency of trade disruption in the coming decades than in the past few, reducing reliance on foreign trade might be a reasonable position.
What the last ~3 years have taught us is that a country should not have critical dependencies on another country. The keywords for the first part of the 21st century will be Deglobalization and aging societies, better buckle up.