Nobody thinks you need a backyard garden to ensure that you can feed your family. You need a grocery store and preferably several, so you have options in case one closes. Food security comes from having choices, not from growing your own tomatoes.
The same logic applies to national security. This lesson is worth taking seriously as administration officials work to protect America’s access to critical materials.
President Trump is correct to be concerned. In an era of great power competition, ensuring that our adversaries cannot cut off American access to the materials that power our economy and our military is a genuine strategic priority. The question is not whether we should take supply chain security seriously. The question is whether tariffs, industrial policy, and other forms of protectionism are the best tools for the job. There’s good reason to suspect that they aren’t, and understanding why suggests a strategy that might actually work. (RELATED: Rare Earths, Real Bottlenecks, and Misguided Policy)
When it comes to trade policy, the distinction between “access” and “production” is lost entirely, which has led to one of the most enduring justifications for protectionism: the national defense argument. The claim, made seriously by members of both parties, goes like this: America must produce steel, aluminum, semiconductors, and other critical materials domestically because, in a crisis, foreign suppliers might cut us off. Therefore, to ensure that we are not at a strategic disadvantage, we must have tariffs, quotas, and an industrial policy that ensures these industries remain viable at home. (RELATED: Under the Radar of the ‘Doomcasting’ Media, There Is Massive Industrial Investment Occurring in the U.S.)
What the United States really needs, for genuine national security purposes, is reliable access to critical materials. This could include domestic production, sure, but it does not necessarily require domestic production. Conflating access with production has led to bad policy at home and actually undermined national security.
Consider the case of steel. The U.S. imports steel from Canada, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, and 75 other countries. Are we “dependent” on any one of them in any serious way? Hardly. If Canadian steel becomes unavailable tomorrow, American manufacturers can turn to other suppliers. The market for steel is global and competitive. No single country, let alone any individual company within a country, has market power over American industry.
Tariffs and other forms of protection do not fix the problem of ensuring reliable access. Instead, what we’ve seen is that they create the very problem they’re trying to solve. By raising the cost of imported steel, they raise the cost of every American manufacturer that uses steel in their production processes. This includes automakers, construction firms, appliance producers, and pipeline builders. Those are the obvious, immediate costs that are being borne by real companies and real workers. The longer-term costs are much worse. Higher input costs are passed on to American consumers, who respond by purchasing less of the now-more-expensive manufactured goods. American manufacturers, seeing their purchase volumes drop, respond by reducing production, which leads to reduced employment in the protected industry itself. This does not strengthen our national defense capability; it hinders it.
The actual risk isn’t imports per se; it’s a monopoly supplier, especially if that monopoly supplier is hostile.
The legitimate version of the national security concern is much narrower than tariff proponents have typically acknowledged. The actual risk isn’t imports per se; it’s a monopoly supplier, especially if that monopoly supplier is hostile. If a single nation controlled the entire world supply of some critical material and could cut us off at will, that would be a serious national security problem worth addressing. The rare earths situation with China provides the clearest example.
The solution to this problem is not blanket tariffs on nearly all imports from nearly all countries. This would be like responding to the risk that the grocery store in town might close by banning all other grocery stores and growing your own tomatoes. Instead, you pursue supply diversification, which includes cultivating alternative sources, investing in allied-nation production capacities, and maintaining strategic reserves where appropriate.
People who think seriously about national security are thinking about redundancy, resilience, and relationships. They ask, “If our main supplier disappeared tomorrow, how quickly could we find another?” They work to build diverse networks of reliable partners. Not only does this ensure access, but it also ensures that no individual partner has any appreciable market power.
What they do not do is assume that domestic production is synonymous with security. As we’ve seen, it isn’t. A domestic steel industry that survives only behind a tariff wall is itself a vulnerability — inefficient, politically dependent, and difficult to scale when it actually matters.
The goal the administration has identified is the right one. Ensuring American access to the materials that underpin our economy and our military is exactly the kind of strategic thinking that the moment demands. But access is best secured through diversification of suppliers, not restriction of them. You don’t protect your family’s food supply by banning grocery stores. You make sure that there are enough of them that losing one doesn’t matter.
True supply chain security is reliable, redundant, and includes competition. Tariffs, industrial policy, and other forms of protectionism do not deliver that. All they do is make groceries more expensive.
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