"We will manufacture everything on our own soil." This is nothing more than political rhetoric designed to swell the hearts of voters on the campaign trail. Those who understand the sheer size and ruthless reality of the global economy know it is an impossibility. Even the mighty United States cannot tear up its entire landscape to mine rare earths, nor can it produce every low-cost T-shirt and plastic bucket while paying the premium wages of domestic workers.
What, then, is the true destination of the empires screaming for "economic security"? Instead of chasing the impossible illusion of total self-sufficiency, they have opted for a far more cunning and clever path: "selective dominance."
You Don’t Need to Make It All—Just Hold the Chokepoint
The industries they want to drag back to their home territories are not across-the-board. They are focusing on a tiny handful of critical "chokepoints" that dictate a nation’s life or death.
Among the thousands of components inside a smartphone, it is perfectly fine to keep importing cheap screws or outer casings from Vietnam or India. However, the state-of-the-art semiconductor foundries—the very brains of that smartphone and of AI servers—must absolutely sit on American soil.
Precisely because they cannot self-produce everything, their strategy is to monopolize the "master keys" without which their adversaries cannot function. The goal is not to own the entire supply chain, but to preemptively occupy the exact position where they can grab the supply chain by the collar. This is the essence of "selective internalization."
Swapping Self-Sufficiency for Friend-Shoring
If you cannot do it all alone, you rewrite the rules of the game to play exclusively with "your own team." The final destination toward which Trump and the American elite are marching as they smash the WTO is not isolationism, but a cliquey, bloc-based "factional trade."
In this setup, the United States draws the blueprints, sources core equipment from the Netherlands and Japan, splits manufacturing between the U.S., South Korea, and Taiwan, and handles final assembly in Mexico or Canada—where immigration risks are low and pro-American alignment is solid.
From this massive, interconnected chain, only China and potentially hostile nations are thoroughly excluded. The era of multilateralism, where business was conducted with the entire world, is over. Now, the curtains have risen on "friend-shoring"—the doctrine that we must trade safely and exclusively with allies who share our trusted values.
Trade Moves On, but Now It’s a Weapon
Ultimately, global commerce will not grind to a halt. It simply functions under a security doctrine rather than the naive market principle of "let’s buy from whoever is cheapest." Now, the primary filter is: "Could this nation suddenly turn on us and sever our supply chain?"
In response, China is also leveraging its own weapons—its monopoly over rare earth elements and intermediate goods supply chains—while gathering pro-Beijing nations to build a counter-empire.
Because the harsh reality remains that no country can achieve total self-sufficiency, the global economy is not splitting into disconnected islands of isolation. Instead, it is heading down a path of deep "bloc-ization," where a U.S.-centric supply chain empire and a China-centric supply chain empire collide on a titanic scale.
Closing Doors, Redrawn Borders
The world is shrinking once again. Knowing that no one can survive entirely alone, empires are frantic—not to isolate themselves, but to rally alliances that can hold a collective grip on the adversary’s throat.
Paradoxically, the obvious common sense that absolute self-sufficiency is impossible is the very reason why modern economic warfare has evolved past simple trade friction. It has transformed into a massive, geopolitical race for hegemony centered on a single question: "Who can build the more reliable alliance for survival?"
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