A Strong America Requires Strong Factories

By Riley Moore | Commentary, The Blaze

America’s hollowed industrial base is our greatest vulnerability — and China’s greatest advantage. We can fix it.

Our country is standing at a crossroads. Neither the world nor America’s place in it is what it was a generation ago. The unipolar moment is over. And yet, many in the Republican Party seek to claim the mantle of America First while continuing the same failed adventurism of the past.

National conservatism as a movement agrees that these people and ideas must be stopped. But we have failed to check their influence in the party largely because we have not offered an alternative that both meets the real threats to American security and balances national interest, the deterrent effect, industrial capability, and political will.

We cannot deter our adversaries if we cannot outbuild them.

I outlined a framework for what a genuine America First foreign policy would entail in an essay for the National Interest. I called for developing a doctrine that I dubbed “prioritized deterrence.” That essay was the first step toward forging a set of foreign policy principles that can unite national conservatives and set the agenda for the Republican Party for the next generation.

A key component of prioritized deterrence is industrial capacity. Deterrence depends not only on our military’s technical capability, but also on our industrial capacity — certainly in defense, but particularly in non-defense. Without factories humming, shipyards bustling, and energy production roaring, our ability to deter wanes. We cannot project strength abroad if we cannot produce strength at home.

Prioritized deterrence is not retreat. It is a recalibration. It rejects the fantasy that America can — or should — police every corner of the globe. Instead, it demands that we concretely identify our vital national interests. No more vague talk of values or entering endless nation-building campaigns. This will require open and honest debate.

The days of tarring dissenting voices as unpatriotic should be left in the rearview mirror. In fact, I recently sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to award Pat Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Buchanan was right about nearly everything 20 years before anyone else realized it, including his recognition that Iraq was not aligned with our strategic national interests. We need serious voices like his in the conversation during these all-important debates.

Prioritized deterrence belongs firmly within the realist school of thought. It rests on restraint and on the quantifiable limits of a nation’s resources and people. Those limits force policymakers to rank threats to the American way of life by urgency and severity.

Deterrence depends on credibility: An aggressor must believe it will pay an unacceptable price for attacking the United States. But not every hostile nation deserves brinkmanship. National constraints and the risk of escalation demand that we focus only on the gravest threats.

Kinetic action must remain credible but reserved as a last resort. The U.S. military exists not only to fight and win wars but, more importantly, to deter them before they begin and ensure American security.

Prioritized deterrence in practice

What does a strategy that contends with these essential questions look like in practice?

Consider the 2020 strike on Qassem Soleimani. A single, precise action eliminated a key architect of Iran’s malign influence, sending a message to Tehran: Kill Americans, and you will pay. No endless wars, no nation-building, just a clear signal backed by lethal force.

Now consider Operation Midnight Hammer. President Trump authorized a precision strike that was executed flawlessly. He rejected calls to further escalate into regime change. As a result, we eliminated a key threat while managing the retaliation from Iran and successfully stepped off the escalation ladder before the region became destabilized. That’s prioritized deterrence in action.

What do these strikes have in common, other than the antagonist? In both cases, the president laid out clear, precise explanations of America’s vital national interest. He aligned the use of force with American goals, and he did so precisely with explicit acknowledgment of our constraints and limitations.

Additionally, both strikes relied on American technological supremacy: drones, stealth bombers, precision munitions, and intelligence — all products of a sophisticated industrial base. However, we cannot just rely on our qualitative military advantage as a silver bullet for deterrence. At a certain point, quantitative advantages become qualitative, which is one of the reasons China’s industrial might has made it so formidable on the world stage.

What is making us less formidable on the world stage is Ukraine. We should not be funding the war in Ukraine, and we should never have been involved in that conflict from the beginning. The proponents of prolonging this conflict seem unable or unwilling to grasp the reality that we do not have the industrial capacity to provide Ukraine with what they need — to say nothing of providing for our own needs here at home.

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