WAKE-UP CALL FOR A SLEEPING GIANT: Review: Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III by Shyam Sankar and Madeline Hart.
With the Cold War’s end, the triumphant West indulged in what Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently called “dangerous delusions.” The United States and its compatriots believed that every nation would eventually become a liberal democracy, that trade and commerce would be liberalizing forces, and that “international law” and not military force would be the final arbitrator.
All of these beliefs have been proven false. China and Russia and their allies in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere don’t want to join the family of nations. Rather, they want to tear down the American-led global order. While the United States and its allies pretended that the basic rules of geopolitics didn’t exist, their enemies knew otherwise.
The West was outsourcing a key component of national power—manufacturing—that China wholeheartedly embraced. Beijing made itself the “factory of the world” using its industrial power to gain leverage over huge swaths of the globe, the United States included. And that leverage comes with a steep cost.
While we believed that manufacturing and tech could be separated, China was busy building. By some estimates, China now has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity that America possesses. In 2024 alone, it’s estimated that one Chinese firm built more ships by tonnage than the United States has in the eight decades since World War II. We now find ourselves in a place where, according to most war games, this country would run out of key munitions in a war with China in mere weeks, perhaps even days.
The Allies won World War II thanks to America’s fabled “Arsenal of Democracy.” We outproduced the Axis powers, fielding munitions and weapons that were essential to a hard-fought victory. In 1943, Joseph Stalin acknowledged as much, toasting “American production, without which this war would have been lost.”
The victors of that war knew something that future generations in the West would tragically forget: Industrial power wins wars.
