America Won’t Exist If We Can’t Build Things
By Chris Power
21 July 2025
You cannot have a great civilization without the ability to make things. That ability—manufacturing—is the foundation of power.
Every great power—the Dutch, the British, and then the Americans—rose to dominance by building the strongest industrial base of their time. That industrial strength produced unmatched military power and global economic influence. It also gave them the reserve currency of the world. It’s not trust alone that keeps the dollar dominant. It’s the belief that America can project power, produce what it needs, and manage a war or crisis. Lose that industrial edge, and we risk losing the dollar’s central place in the global system.
That’s why the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency today—not only because of Wall Street, but because of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and the industrial base that made America indispensable. Remember: We won World War II because we had the strongest industrial base in the world. We didn’t have the best tanks; we had the strongest capacity for production.
But roughly every 120 years, global leadership shifts hands.
Why? Because success breeds complacency. Great societies, like great countries and companies, eventually get comfortable. They ride on the coattails of their success. They offshore everything to developing countries because they have the luxury of prioritizing returns and efficiency over resilience. It’s easy to chase lower costs abroad when the threats seem far away. But when it matters most, these societies find they’ve lost the capacity to build anything that counts.
In the late stages of dominance, comfort replaces urgency. Consistent with Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs hypothesis, great powers in decline convince themselves they’re still invincible. We think we’re Mike Tyson in his prime—but we’re actually Tyson on the night he lost to Buster Douglas: unprepared, overconfident, and shocked when reality hits back.
If this sounds abstract, look at Britain in the early 20th century. Once the world’s most powerful factory and navy, it gradually ceded industrial and naval dominance to the U.S. as it focused more on finance and imperial administration. Or take the Dutch Golden Age in the 16th and 17th centuries, which ended when others surpassed them in shipbuilding and manufacturing.
Historical precedent indicates that great powers tend to lose industrial primacy every 100 to 120 years. America assumed it from Britain in the mid-20th century. Today, the U.S. faces demographic headwinds: an aging workforce, falling birth rates, and stagnant labor force participation, especially in industrial trades. Meanwhile, China now produces nearly 30 percent of the world’s manufactured goods and graduates 3.6 million STEM students per year—more than four times the U.S. total. China is also ramping up investment in key areas of industrial capacity and influence, from shipbuilding to new energy tech to AI-powered manufacturing. If industrial might is the foundation of power, then we may be just 10 to 20 years away from the next global power shift.
The U.S. is hurtling toward a generational grudge match with the Chinese Communist Party. And unless we act now, we won’t have the means to win it.
From the 1970s to the 2020s, the U.S. offshored a significant share of its commercial manufacturing that wasn’t bolted down to our shores by defense regulation. We lost the skill to make things in America. We decimated our middle class and exported the best job-creation engine we’ve ever had.
We also moved our wealth away from industrial centers and into the cities. That’s because we believed globalization would make the world safer. Because we believed services and software could replace steel and ships. Because we thought trade would tame authoritarian regimes.
These assumptions—the natural consequence of decades of world domination—helped dismantle the industrial core of the country, and now threaten that very domination.
