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If your manufacturing is not price-competitive abroad, your military is not price-competitive abroad. Because the wartime economy is just a subset of the peacetime economy. You can only turn plowshares into swords if you’re cranking out plowshares at low cost and high quality. Military equipment will be bought at whatever price. It’s a non-negotiable spend for any regime. That’s why North Korea spends 25%+ of its GDP on the military. So it’s not totally crazy to reboot manufacturing with a military-first approach. It may work over the very long run. The issue is that those armaments need to be price-competitive abroad to win any war of attrition abroad. For example, if their drones cost $2000 and your missiles cost $2M, that can only be sustained so long as the money printer keeps cranking out cash. Adopting global tariffs makes it much less likely that the money printer endures. Moreover, tariffs and subsidies actually inhibit the development of a price-competitive military. They are aimed at protecting the home market, not winning the export market. The path Russia took after they shut down their global empire and became just a country again was to gradually become an exporter of price-competitive arms, minerals, and natural resources. It arguably did work for them, but it took 30+ years.
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