by porridgeraisin | 2025-04-03 06:50:45+00:00
My interpretation is that today other countries are less willing to take on the role the US would like them to. So, the chosen solution in the US now is to wind down this approach, and try to bring back production to the country. I don't know enough to comment on the effectiveness of the method they are using to do this, but that they are doing it is clear to me.

China is not going to play this role anymore as has been made clear over the last 2 years. Them being the largest country playing this role for the last decade has fueled this recent revamp in the US.

Russia has not really played that role for a long long time.

India(me being an Indian, I might be biased) is way way too slow to be depended on to sustain the sheer scale of US' requirements. Also, compared to china, it's actually getting more and more difficult to get "shit jobs" done here, which might be surprising. It is for all the wrong reasons though, so not much to celebrate as an indian. However, india has enough domestic potential to be self sufficient, so nothing to worry about either.

A few years ago, I thought the next "dump yard country" for the US would be africa. But their progress to the required level is clearly multiple decades away, so that's out of the window in the short- and medium- term. Europe is already finding it difficult to get much out of Africa, despite still basically controlling multiple countries there. Thus, they are having to resort to immigration from the middle east (some 10 years back, it was all from africa)

Needless to say, "freewheelers" (for lack of a better word) such as western europe and australia&oceania were never under consideration, and will never accept this role.

Eastern Europe/SEA are "up for grabs", but the former is already saturated playing this role for western europe/russia (and the two fight for control of the same) and the latter is thoroughly saturated playing this role for china. You saw this play out recently with the attempt to get ukraine's rare earth industry serving the US. Russia invaded them for similar reasons.

The upper middle east clearly will not play this role, preferring to live in substandard conditions and submit to terrorist organisations instead (and who can blame them?) China seems to love supporting these lot too.

Saudi Arabia/UAE are options, and the new US government has made good use of them (atleast on paper) with the new investments. However, they can only do so much given their size, geography and demographics.

I never thought they would allow it to happen, but even LatAm is slowly being "lost" to china.

And suddenly, you've run out of countries! Maybe we'll find some martians though, they can do the welding for the starship.

Strangely, the US is also seemingly losing its ability to maintain an edge through intellectual property. The whole hype in non-technical circles when Deepseek came out was a reaction to this. 20 years ago, it would have been protected better. The IP from 20 years ago is protected well... even today! See: semiconductor manufacturing. Some people say this is because you're now needing to import people too (and so, the knowledge leaks). Some people probe further and say that this happened in the first place because of worsening education in the US. I am inclined to agree with this, since over financialization/trade/empire-building and increasingly poorer education was also what killed medieval india, which I have more knowledge of. However, I might be making more of the symmetry than there is.