You think President Trump or any other US President ever would go to war with China over Hong Kong? Let’s put aside their nuclear arsenal. And let’s put aside the subsurface interdiction fleet and anti-ship weaponry they’ve been building for the past couple decades to limit our ability to project power into their territorial waters without horrendous losses. Imagine for 2 seconds what would happen to the US economy if everything we rely on China to produce for us suddenly just stopped. How many things CAN you even buy today that aren’t at least made in part in China? We’ve handed them the keys to our economic engine and trusted them not to run it into the ground because it wouldn’t be in their economic interest to do so. But what if it suddenly were?
My point is, unless and until we’re prepared to actually produce the things we need in the US again, we are extremely vulnerable with China. I think the people of Hong Kong deserve freedom, but I also don’t think it’s worth 100,000 dead American soldiers, half our navy, and two decades of economic ruin in the United States to help secure that freedom. President Trump is absolutely right: America first. That BEGINS with manufacturing and economic self-sufficiency.
It also requires massive updates to our military forces starting with how we design and build weapons systems. The F-22 is a great example of a second-to-none aircraft that only became economically infeasible because the parts were produced (and I’m not kidding or exaggerating) by over 1,000 subcontractors and suppliers spread across 46 states. Can you imagine how much your car would cost if the left windshield wiper were made by a company in Maine, the right wiper by a company in Texas, the windshield by a company in Minnesota, the left headlight by a company in South Carolina, and so on for each and every part of the car, then every part individually shipped to another location for assembly? That would be insane, right? But that’s how we build weapons systems for our military now because it’s how we get people in Congress to vote for those things and not cancel them (money coming into their district).
Russia isn’t communist today because communist/socialist states are intrinsically doomed to failure by their very nature. The Soviet Union collapsed much faster than normal because President Reagan understood we had the economic engine to dump money into the military and the Soviets didn’t, but they also believed their very survival depended on keeping up with us. President Reagan made them push their dying economic engine past its breaking point and their whole system imploded. Since that time, we’ve gutted ourselves by outsourcing all the jobs that actually build things to China. And now that everything we need to function day-to-day is built in China, you think we can really stand up to them?
President Trump is helping get us started. He signed an executive order saying that PPE paid for by the US government needs to be made in the USA. He’s negotiating with Intel (the microchip manufacturer) and others to bring tech manufacturing back to the US. We were fools to trust China in the first place, but they lured us in with slave labor cost savings. We need to buck up and pay a little more for American quality and reliability. And for the economic security of being self-sufficient.
Maybe you should consider how the people reacted to WW II. We moved from a depression to the top manufacturer in the world in less than 4 years. We out produced everyone and even had surplus for England and Russia. We could do it again. Read some of Charlie Daniels comments and YouTube Comments and learn what a Patriot really is.