In past decades, American surface transportation policy centered around questions like how much to spend, how much to distribute between roads and transit, and how much each state should get in return for its federal gas tax contribution. Today, surface transportation policy is taking place against the backdrop of multiple technology revolutions in autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles, with China potentially poised to dominate the latter—and possibly the former as well.

Paradoxically, Western pharmaceutical companies impose persistent price inflation on these medicines, often exceeding general inflation rates, while benefiting simultaneously from reduced production costs through outsourced API manufacturing and intense competition among Chinese suppliers. This dual advantage has made their business models unusually comfortable.

The DPC’s experience offers a roadmap for contemporary efforts to rebuild strategic industries and reduce dependence on adversarial supply chains. America’s reindustrialization challenge today is primarily a capital allocation problem. The question facing policymakers is not whether to use equity, loans, or purchase commitments, but how to design sustainable financing mechanisms that maximize private capital leverage while maintaining fiscal discipline and avoiding the rent-seeking and political capture that has undermined previous industrial policy efforts. The lessons can be distilled into the following principles.

Much as the South Korean government made investments in the 1970s and 1980s, or as development-oriented sovereign wealth funds do today, the United States should use the South Korean and Japanese investment funds to invest in long-term breakthrough technologies as well as to help critical U.S. industries obtain the financing they need to scale up manufacturing. Against this thesis, the funds’ planned investments in the shipbuilding, energy, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, and quantum computing sectors, make sense conceptually.

The republic begins its 250th year, however, with its economy reliant on foreign-flagged ships, and its commercial fleet rusted and in need of repair. Should a global conflict erupt, this fleet would be unable to support our warfighters. This deterioration is proportional to the rise of China’s fleet, now the world’s largest. The decline of American ship­building is a crisis and a grave danger to our economic and national security.