Because nearly everything in the modern global economy is connected in one way or another to everything else – and because no domestic industry can expand without causing other domestic industries to be smaller than they would otherwise be, and thus causing the prices of many inputs unexpectedly to rise throughout the economy – there is no categorically distinct set of industries that can objectively be identified as “Critical for National Defense” with other industries identified as not-critical. As soon as the national-security exception to the case for free trade is made available, determining which industries are to be protected and which aren’t will inevitably be done with a heavy helping of guess-work and speculation, and topped off with heaping amounts of pork and politics.
This unfortunate reality – along with many other, more familiar challenges reviewed elsewhere – about the difficulties of using protectionism to strengthen national security doesn’t mean that there are no real-world instances for which the use of such trade restrictions is appropriate. Reality is messy, imperfect, and uncertain. The point of the above economic assessment is simply to warn that identifying some goods, such as steel and aluminum, that clearly are currently major inputs used by the military is not itself sufficient to justify protecting domestic producers of these goods from foreign competition. National security itself stands a good chance of being compromised by too quickly concluding that producers of such goods must be protected in order to ensure national security.
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