A little mercantilism, for a treat. As late as 2015, the notion America should “bring back” manufacturing was considered a kind of politics exclusive to poor, dumb hicks hopelessly nostalgic for a life that never really existed, and if it did exist — whatever — it could not exist again. Get over it. Trade was global, the world was inextricably connected, and your job’s in China now but you should thank us, actually, because everything is cheap and fast and out-of-work factory workers can simply learn to code.

Then there was a plague, and we learned about supply-chains.

The first thing Wuhan’s coronavirus made clear was decades of globalist policy had destroyed America’s ability to provide its own furniture, let alone sustain a technologically-advanced economy without the rare metal mining, processing, and manufacturing that took place almost entirely in autocratic prison states. Cheap global trade was no mere perk of contemporary life, it was our oxygen. Now, a couple years into the realization, all eyes are on Taiwan. This is not only because Taiwan is a free country at risk of being swallowed by the Chinese mainland, which I’m sure everyone will feel very bad about for the couple weeks following Xi’s invasion, but because Taiwan produces nearly all the world’s advanced microchips, the first and most important building blocks of our entire technological reality.