I dislike this analogy because a nation is not a person grocery shopping and anyway if a single grocery store was the only way to get food that would put me in a very lopsided relationship with them and the power dynamics in such a case are obviously bad for the person.
Nations have interests and there’s a real conversation to be had that a country should ensure it has strategic industries so its existence is never at the whims of another.
In academic and think tank circles it is. Too many people treat political theatre and, frankly, entertainment pieces as reflective of the actual policy debates when they are mass media designed to get clicks.
Right but this is actual policy. The Trump Administration does actual policy built off poorly formed fiscal reasoning. That's why we see blanket tariffs. There is no strategy.
Maybe some smart people, somewhere, would hypothetically have a strategy. Those people currently hold no power. It's not "political theater", it's our ACTUAL politics. It's just so ridiculous that it looks like theater. Which just means the situation is worse than you originally thought.
This is one view. Another view is that maintaining economic interdependence between countries — aside from making both countries richer via specialization and comparative advantage — is a great way to incentivize cooperation and prevent them from killing each other.
OK, so someone wrote a book and was wrong at the time. Times change. It's like saying in 2003 that nobody should launch a social network because the first one, Six Degrees, failed to take off. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com)
Needs to be two-way though. What if we rely on China, but they don't rely on us? Well then they can destroy us at any moment. It needs to be MAD to be a deterrent.
Nations have interests and there’s a real conversation to be had that a country should ensure it has strategic industries so its existence is never at the whims of another.