IMHO, such an concept would lead to a perfect protectionist regime while not giving any real enhanced security at all.
There are two paths to making this work. One is domestic production, which as you say might work for the United States, but the other is supply diversity. If you don't have a local industry but there is one in Canada, Germany and South Korea, and those countries are your allies, you're probably fine. The issue comes when you're entirely reliant on a single country (e.g. China), especially when that country is undemocratic/authoritarian. Because that makes it too easy for them to betray you without you being able to do anything about it, significantly increasing the probability that they actually do it.
I would think countries would take a cost and risk-based approach. Countries that have the means, and who face major risks from a compromised supply chain compared to other standing risks, might want to think about moving things in-house.
Honduras and Nigeria might have other, more pressing concerns. Liechtenstein in particular is a financial center with an extensive manufacturing base and attendant expertise, so it might be worth considering for them.
wrt computers, why not if they're capable and willing? it has increasingly obvious and critical security considerations. russia already has a fledgling domestic processor industry for these reasons:
https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/05/25/russia-showcases-f...
It seems like the main fabricators based in Russia are still working on getting below 90nm.
Poisoning a population or depriving them of power is a great way to start a war. Peeking at their computers is merely espionage. So yes, food and power might be more important, but there exists sufficient political deterrent already.
It's not even terribly hard. AFAIK you can buy all the tooling quite easily, and it's a well understood problem.
The USA has a strong semiconductor industry. Probably stronger than China’s. China is traditionally not very strong an semiconductor fabrication.
What they are strong at is PCB assembly. Or rather cheap PCB assembly. You can do that in the USA too, it’s just not as cheap.
I’d guess most military stuff is done in the USA of domestic and mostly non-China made parts.
They're usually not the cheap brands though. The low end is dominated by foreign manufacturers, so Europeans have moved up the value chain.
There's Carlos Santos in Portugal which takes advantage of the fact that Portugal has the lowest labor costs in Europe.
Meermin (in Spain) has a hybrid model where they source from Europe (French tanners), start the manufacture in China, and finish in Spain. Their products are reasonably priced, and pretty high quality.
It's a similar story with Dutch clothier SuitSupply. Their designs are European, and they source their fabrics from Italian mills, but sew their suits in China.
The issue with chips is, that a modern fab plant costs $1bn. You can't just make it happen, immediately. Same with food production. Technology, guns/steel, energy/oil/gas and food, those are the main "national security" industries.
Lack of local manufacturing isn't really important in a world of global commerce, but when governments start using their manufacturing as a weapon in dimplomatic disputes it becomes important.
Also, clothing and shoes (mentioned in the comment I responded to) are easy to produce without massive capital outlay, and the raw materials are readily available from several countries. I think the local manufacturing argument makes more sense with regard to items that are seen as critical, and which would be impractical to obtain from elsewhere - such as motherboards, processors and the like.
Whilst raw materials could be easily available, there is a ramp-up time to move any industry locally, both in terms of creating the manufacturing infrastructure, and in terms of acquiring the skills needed locally.
This is the basic reasoning of every "national security" argument about having domestic production.
The parent is merely stating that basic necessities are also important for the well-being of the nation, it's not just about the IC for ballistic missiles or the 3G circuits that allows Trump to always be on twitter.
I don't think it matters for many items, such as clothing and shoes, because they are cheap to make and readily available from several countries. So even if China randomly decided that they wouldn't ship any clothes to the US anymore (which would hurt them just as much, so is unlikely), you can just as easily obtain them from Bangladesh or Vietnam, or indeed make them yourself.
While they tend to cost more, for the most part, unless you follow the vagaries of fashion, they are worth the extra money.
I bought a belt from an American company after researching different leathers. It's lasting me years at this point. I'm sure it will last decades. It's crazy how much money I wasted before on belts that were a third of the price.
https://saddlebackleather.com/full-grain-leather-belt
Make sure you double check sizing. It's not the same as jeans.
Both top grain and full grain have their uses, so it depends on whether you want some character in the item as it ages or not. Generally speaking if you don't know what to do, go with full grain. It's expensive, but it's great.
The only case where I'd recommend top grain over full grain is if you're buying something where the leather needs to stay in the background. Think a multi-material item like a bag that has both a bright cloth part and a muted leather part then you'll want top grain for the muted leather because it will keep a more consistent style over time so it won't split your attention when looking at it in the future.
I have found no other use for the other types of leather. I'm far from an expert, but from my research and personal experience I really think that the rest of the leather out there is complete garbage.
Companies doing photo masks for chip lithography do exist in the US. Some of them have been bought by international parents. And those international parents jump through plenty of hoops to keep their certification for being able to continue to produce photo masks for classified military projects — only US citizens are allowed to work on those projects, they may need their own clearances, etc....
Don’t think just because SuperMicro may not have been a party to that system doesn’t mean the system in question doesn’t exist.
If the intelligence apparatus abuses that for the purpose of spying on foreign governments that is an entirely unrelated issue. Their security is their problem.
And yes, if these are sold to other countries, they get to choose who owns them, the US or China. Unless they start their own manufacturing.
For example until the tariff war China was highly dependent on US agriculture (not just buying soybeans from American farmers, but by owning the largest pork producer in the US, Smithfield farms). Well they still are, of course, but they are aggressively looking for alternate trade ties.
The US and major European economies are intermingled tightly enough that it's unlikely that there could be a war between them. The NATO umbrella discouraged them from investing themselves in war-fighting capability (costing the US a lot less than the cost of fighting another war in Europe!). To that extent NATO is a fig leaf, an important one.
And maybe it did; unfortunately, the myth of offense dominance guaranteed that diplomatic crises would escalate uncontrollably into war, masking any effect which discouraged war as a choice in its own right rather than as a preventive measure against the risk that an opponent would choose war.
It's very difficult to isolate and evaluate the effect of one factor.
(theoretically about having "capacities" that Chinese, Russians etc don't have but that's clearly an outdated concept - having the fastest processors in some defense system hardly matters compared to having secure electronic system broadly).
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-plans-47-billion-fund-to-...