Brilliant move. Giving South Korea the U.S. approval required to provide for its own defense, while using that to incentivize investment into American shipbuilding.
It's more that South Korea and Japan are the last developed countries, where it's still economically viable to build cargo ships. Several European countries have robust shipbuilding industry, but they focus on higher-value ships such as cruise ships.
By becoming wealthy later than European countries.
Shipyards are long-term investments. It makes sense to build them when you have the expertise and labor costs are in your favor. But once you have built them, they are a sunk cost. You can remain competitive against countries with cheaper labor for decades.
Globalization and the growth of international trade also helped. China built new shipyards, but the demand for new ships also grew, keeping Korean and Japanese shipyards in business. Meanwhile, the wage gap is gradually getting narrower.
Not an expert but I think it has a lot to do with what gets prioritized by the government and other groups. Tax breaks and other support aren't infinite and where they (any given government) chooses to use them makes a big impact.
An interesting example of this is the US modernizations of its military industrial capacity by supply pre- and during WWI. There was intense debate in the international community as to whether non-warring countries could supply nations at war without being considered combatants.
If they aren’t, you can’t neutralize the enemies supplies. If they are, those third countries are effectively part of the conflict.
The US had to take the latter stance because it didn’t have a strong industry to product its own weapons. If it supported nations from buying from non-warring parties, it would be shit out of luck if it had its own wars. So it received a lot of investment from European powers, generating jobs, economic growth, and the funding to expand its domestic production without having to take on debt or wait for a war to break out.
Come its entry into WWI and then WWII, the US had a strong home base of industrial capacity for arms manufacturing.
I imagine countries would only do this begrudgingly out of necessity. The U.S. has positioned itself as unworthy of trust and respect and is basically taking the mafia protection approach to getting other nations to work with it.
I would be very worried about any form of built in kill switch / degrade effectiveness based on recent F-16 fiasco that sobered entire Europe into massive military spending.
Trust lost is trust that either never comes back or it takes tremendous, long term continuous effort. Not holding my breath.
the good news here is that embedding a kill switch into a nuclear sub won't work very well since they don't communicate with the outside world for months at a time
