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Kind of. They’re required (or agree to?) to use local labor at least in part, but there American companies that manage the construction. My grandfather (a U.S. citizen) does security inspections for embassy construction, verifying that it’s built to plan, that all materials are traceable to point of origin, etc.

Why not pay a local labor team to sit idle while you do the work yourself? Would be worth it

iPhones and Teslas would be overkill anyway: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/thing/

Yeah, that seems completely unavoidable otherwise.

I've always seen it as pretty strange to carry around other people's computers or using external services-- so I've always seen things like phones, Google Maps, etc. as things that it is strange that any country that isn't the US allows people to use.

I don't think one absolutely needs to make everything oneself, but I can't imagine that it's sensible that everybody use external services, so that so much information ends up in one place.