From a recent thread on X, here’s Nick Land (@Xenocosmography) on tariffs:
The Tariffs ledger, positive and negative, is far more complicated than established opinion (or nationalist enthusiasm) is allowing for. For the US specifically, the highest priority positive factor is this:
Losing core strategic industrial capacity through international division of labor is a geopolitically unacceptable outcome of naively optimistic anti-mercantile liberalism. If it turns out you don’t have comparative advantage in cutting-edge meta-machine-tools, you lose the world (and every type of true liberalism, naively cosmopolitan, or not, along with it). It’s fine for Switzerland to specialize down to financial services and chocolate. For the USA, not so much.
Lying back and waiting to find out what the ‘world community’ (through the global market) thinks your nation should be producing is not an acceptable position for the redoubt of liberty on earth. (It’s mostly going to be cartoons and other things without sharp edges.)