From a geopolitical point of view, sending our manufacturing operations to poor countries only made economic sense if (a) there would never be war or supply chain disruptions and (b) you didn’t care what happened to the people who were doing the manufacturing here and who found there were no equivalent jobs to shift to.
First Covid interrupted the supply chains while many of the former factory workers overdosed on street drugs fueling a surge of “deaths of despair.” Then the attack on Ukraine caused a reappraisal of the pie-in-the-sky idea that war was no more, an idea exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s debunked “end of history.”
If these forces cause the U.S. to repatriate our essential manufacturing then some good can come from the disruptions we are experiencing. A degree of autarky is no bad thing, although like anything else it can be overdone.
