Comment by rayiner
11 hours ago
Brilliant move. Giving South Korea the U.S. approval required to provide for its own defense, while using that to incentivize investment into American shipbuilding.
11 hours ago
Brilliant move. Giving South Korea the U.S. approval required to provide for its own defense, while using that to incentivize investment into American shipbuilding.
I wouldn’t call it a genius move.
Just long overdue: South Korea is one of the last, staunch US allies that can build large ships at scale.
But will bringing manufacturing to Philadelphia be a mistake? Will they run into the generations-steeped shipyard workers and steelworkers?
Will American steelworkers try put one over to make themselves an expense, or a legit partnership to help each other?
I can see this going either way; and I hope this partnership transcends the usual, petty partisanship.
All the potential problems listed by the parent are due to the workers. Who do you think promotes those narratives and why?
It's more that South Korea and Japan are the last developed countries, where it's still economically viable to build cargo ships. Several European countries have robust shipbuilding industry, but they focus on higher-value ships such as cruise ships.
How do they achieve it? The cost of living and social services can’t be that much different from at least mid-tier EU members.
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That's a genius move!
We should get every country to do this.
Build your nuclear subs here, in the US shipyards. We'll help you!
We can massively expand our capacity, which will be important for self defense in the coming decades.
An interesting example of this is the US modernizations of its military industrial capacity by supply pre- and during WWI. There was intense debate in the international community as to whether non-warring countries could supply nations at war without being considered combatants.
If they aren’t, you can’t neutralize the enemies supplies. If they are, those third countries are effectively part of the conflict.
The US had to take the latter stance because it didn’t have a strong industry to product its own weapons. If it supported nations from buying from non-warring parties, it would be shit out of luck if it had its own wars. So it received a lot of investment from European powers, generating jobs, economic growth, and the funding to expand its domestic production without having to take on debt or wait for a war to break out.
Come its entry into WWI and then WWII, the US had a strong home base of industrial capacity for arms manufacturing.
I imagine countries would only do this begrudgingly out of necessity. The U.S. has positioned itself as unworthy of trust and respect and is basically taking the mafia protection approach to getting other nations to work with it.
I would be very worried about any form of built in kill switch / degrade effectiveness based on recent F-16 fiasco that sobered entire Europe into massive military spending.
Trust lost is trust that either never comes back or it takes tremendous, long term continuous effort. Not holding my breath.
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Part of AUKUS is this.
But doesnt it also give russia incentive for walking distance sabotage