Manufacturing and Geopolitics

William Tecumseh Sherman, to a southern friend, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War:
"Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make."

A Chinese general in 2025 might express similar thoughts regarding the United States. Certainly, the US today is more industrialized that the American South was in 1860, but there are a whole lot of very important items that we cannot make without Chinese involvement.

Here are some manufacturing-related links that I've collected over the past few weeks:

Alexander Stahel: The greatest geopolitical miscalculation of our age: believing that transferring industrial know-how to a one-party state would make it a stakeholder in the free world. Read the whole thing.

Strategic Paralysis and Economic Dependence: The United States’ long-standing inaction toward China stems from a misguided optimism in economic engagement, which prioritized access to a consumer market over confronting rising authoritarianism and strategic dependencies—particularly in critical sectors like rare earths. Institutional complacency, reinforced by academia, business, and policy elites, has entrenched a status quo that undermines national security.

Empires and Manufacturing, at LinkedIn

Kumar Thangudo argues that the Order of Operations Necessary to Reshore Manufacturing at Relevant Scale is Unlikely and Fail Prone, including a claim that the Trunp administration is doing things in the wrong order.

Aaron Slodov, who runs a startup focused on automated tool & die making, says: i’m really tired of ragebait on how advanced china’s industrial base is. let’s dispel this by diving into NIST’s MIC report. note: do not read this if you’re a gullible euro VC or western exec who would back down after a factory visit to china. we still need to act NOW.

And Alexander Campbell argues that China Can’t Win.

What can we learn from the latest rare earths crisis?

What would be required to reshore rare earths and do it quickly?

And here is a startup, Solcoa Industries, which says America can reclaim Rare Earth Metal dependence from China. Solcoa Industries is producing 100% North American made Rare Earth metals, carbon-zero, economically, at scale.

It has been argued that America isn’t a good place for chip fabs because at TSMC, PhD-level engineers work in three rotating shifts. The fabs in Taiwan run 24 hours a day without stopping. Do you really think Americans would work like this? Or even want to? But Greg Koenig asks why do chip fabs need PhD engineers on the line 24/7? What is so unstable in these processes that you need this level to keep the thing running on a minute by minute basis?

Why Elon Musk bought a tool & die company in Michigan

Digital metalcasting…custom cast parts, fast. There’s a video here

American Reindustrialization: Empty Promises vs Massive Opportunities. A framework for assessing the venture opportunities in today’s manufacturing landscape.

A history post at Facebook notes that while Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, the potential of the drug wasn't unlocked until Howard Florey and Ernst Chain figured out how to mass produce it. It's not sufficiently understood that process innovation is as important as product innovation. (An earlier example can be found in the history of the steam engine--James Watt's invention of a much-more-efficient engine could not have been produced at scale without John Wilkinson's invention of a method for boring cylinders more precisely.)

JP Morgan has launched a $1.5 trillion initiative to support companies in areas including: Supply Chain and Advanced Manufacturing, which includes critical minerals, pharmaceutical precursors and robotics; Defense and Aerospace, which includes defense technology, autonomous systems, drones, next-gen connectivity and secure communications; Energy Independence and Resilience, which includes battery storage, grid resilience and distributed energy; and Frontier and Strategic Technologies, including AI, cybersecurity and quantum computing

JD Vance on Our Great Amerian Industrial Comeback.

Why you should Never Bet Against America.

(An earlier version of the links collection was published at Chicago Boyz, where there is a discussion thread)