Progressive Politics

I’m surprised they didn’t do it a long time ago. There’s clearly powerful people who want a hot war with China. Why the hell would they help us build the weapons to do so?

The next thing about this is that it's part of a perfect storm:

• Trump demonstrates to our allies that we can't be trusted on defense; allies start ramping up domestic defense
• Allies make the obvious connection that it they can't trust us on defense, they can't trust us on weapons. There are domestic competitors to US weapons - Leopard tanks often compete with the Abrams, the EuroJet and French submarines compete on bids; the EU already uses mostly domestic riflery. So they start ramping down purchases of American military arms; bids and evaluations now include the consideration of the instability of the US government.
• Now the US defense industry not only has fewer customers, but don't have the materials to build the weaponry anyway
• We're not subsidizing Ukraine anymore, which is a significant loss in sales even if we were selling them old stock - if we still have that old stock, there's less demand to replace it, ergo the US military is buying less materiel.

I'm sure the military-industrial complex is loving this administration.