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We have neglected preparedness, hardening, and resiliency for decades. This is long overdue, quite apart from the immediate threat environment. The more complex and globalized our systems become, the more vulnerable they are, and we cannot and will not be able to anticipate all contingencies.

There are scores of issues here. Two are longtime hobby horses of mine: the defense industrial base; and a more decentralized electrical grid.

Corporate America bought into globalized supply chains decades ago. Most other countries have to do this by necessity; smaller countries simply don’t have the scale to be autonomous in a pinch. The U.S., however, is in a more favorable situation, and that is a strategic asset.

This doesn’t mean we should simply throw up tariffs and go fully mercantilist on trade. International competition keeps both huge corporations and organized labor honest. The people in Germany, Korea or Japan who build high quality cars and sell them in the U.S. are not underpaid, and they are not our enemies. The issue there is reciprocity; their markets should be as open as ours to peer group competition.

That said, bad things happen and we should manage downside risk. That means getting serious once again about identifying strategic industries and maintaining an adequate domestic production base and supply chain. That needn’t mean autarky, and I wish Trump would stop talking like he wants to emulate North Korea’s juche system. So it becomes a matter of deciding what percentage of the U.S. supply chain to protect, and how to do it without simply handing the keys to the unions and three selected winner corporations that will play crony suckup politics with the political class.

We can keep older cars on the road indefinitely, so maybe we can settle for a 50 percent domestic baseline. But advanced chips are a critical weak spot; maybe we should shoot for at least 50 percent domestic, or even more. We want to keep the supply chain as competitive as possible, so it’s a matter of deciding how much short term domestic demand could be triaged in a serious crisis. I’m not terribly concerned if Apple, which loves sweatshop labor in Asia, gets hammered on its nonstop rollouts of new iPhones to its addicted, cultish customer base. But there are innumerable vital systems that we can’t afford to jeopardize. So: pick a domestic supply threshold.

Decentralization of the electrical grid is another biggie. I’ve been grousing about this for many years, largely as a result of econazi nonsense coming largely from the big blue cities and states that think energy is too dirty to produce themselves, so they want flyover country to do the dirty work. Maybe we should require every state to be at least 75 percent self-sufficient in baseload electrical generation. With small, modular nuclear reactors becoming available, I’d push it even further, down to major metro areas. Require the NYC metro area to be 75 percent self-sufficient. Let the libs get their hands dirty actually producing power, instead of just lecturing the rest of America on their moral superiority.

I’ll add a third: food. The U.S. is the world’s largest agricultural exporter (even if Trump seems to lose sight of that fact in his tariff wars). We obviously want open markets globally. U.S. farmers are among our trade superstars. But internationally, we have to recognize that most foreign countries are fundamentally apprehensive about becoming totally import dependant in food. That’s where we have to be fair bargaining partners, insisting on reciprocal recognition of strategic vulnerabilities.