Have you ever tried to buy anything at a hardware store that isn’t made in China or maybe Taiwan? When was the last time you saw any item of clothing with the label, Made in the USA? Given the deterioration of our industrial base, we would be hard pressed to ramp up war production as we did in the two World Wars and the North did in the Civil War. Given what has been given away to Ukraine, we are now in a deficit in ammunition and arms. Do we have the machine tool capacity to rapidly increase firearms, airplane, and vehicle production?
Ramping up our own production for stuff like that is one option, but the much more likely option is we would just source those kinds of goods from some other country with lots of available labor that will work for cheap, like we did before China was manufacturing all of that for us. And there is no shortage of those kinds of countries in the world. We might pay a few cents more, and have some supply chain problems, before everything in Walmart said “Made in Mexico”, “Made in Pakistan”, or “Made in Vietnam”, but that’s probably how it would go.