In this country we stand at a crossroads—as a movement, as a party, and as a nation. The world is not what it was a generation ago, nor is America’s place in the world. The unipolar moment is over. And yet many in the GOP seek to claim the mantle of America First while continuing the same failed adventurism of the past. National Conservatism as a movement agrees that these people and ideas must be stopped. But we have failed to check their influence in the party in large part because we have not offered an alternative that meets the real threats to American security and balances national interest, the deterrent effect, industrial capability, and political will.

In a piece that was recently published in the National Interest, I sketched out a framework for what a real America First foreign policy looks like. I called for developing a doctrine that I called “Prioritized Deterrence.” That essay was the first step toward spelling out a set of foreign policy principles that can unite National Conservatives and set the agenda for the Republican Party for the next generation.

I want to highlight a key component of Prioritized Deterrence: industrial capacity. Our ability to deter depends not only on our military’s technical capability, but also on our industrial capacity—certainly in defense, but particularly in non-defense. Without factories humming, shipyards bustling, and energy production roaring, our ability to deter wanes. We cannot project strength abroad if we cannot produce strength at home.

Prioritized Deterrence is not retreat—it is a recalibration. It rejects the fantasy that America can—or should—police every corner of the globe. Instead, it demands that we identify our vital national interests. No more vague talk of values or entering endless nation-building campaigns. This will require open and honest debate.

The days of tarring dissenting voices as unpatriotic should be left in the rearview mirror. In fact, I recently sent a letter to President Trump urging him to award Pat Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Buchanan was right about pretty much everything 20 years before anyone else realized it, including his recognition that the war in Iraq was not in alignment with our strategic national interests. We need serious voices like his in the conversation during these all-important debates.

Prioritized Deterrence is certainly in the school of realism. It’s girded by restraint and guided by quantifiable and inherent constraints placed on the nation, its resources, and people, which necessitate the prioritization of existential threats to the American way of life based on urgency and severity. Deterrence only works when there is a credible threat to an aggressor and an unacceptable cost for aggression against the U.S. That said, prioritization is key—we cannot enter into a game of brinkmanship with every agitator nation given national constraints and the ever-looming potential for escalation. Lastly, kinetic military action must be credible, but always a last resort.

Let me be clear: the point of the U.S. military is not simply to fight and win wars but, more importantly, to deter conflict before it happens and guarantee our national security. 

What does a strategy that contends with these essential questions look like in practice?

Consider the 2020 strike on Qasem Soleimani. A single, precise action eliminated a key architect of Iran’s malign influence, sending a message to Tehran: kill Americans and you will pay. No endless wars, no nation-building—just a clear signal backed by lethal force. And now look at Operation Midnight Hammer. President Trump authorized a precision strike that was executed flawlessly. He rejected calls to further escalate into regime change. As a result, we eliminated a key threat while managing retaliation from Iran, and successfully stepped off the escalation ladder before the region became destabilized. That’s Prioritized Deterrence in action.

What do these strikes have in common, other than the antagonist? In both cases, the president laid out clear, precise explanations of America’s vital national interest. He aligned the use of force with American goals, and did so precisely with explicit acknowledgement of our constraints and limitations. Additionally, both strikes relied on American technological supremacy: drones, stealth bombers, precision munitions, and intelligence—all products of a sophisticated industrial base.

However, we cannot just rely on our qualitative military advantage as a silver bullet for deterrence. At a certain point quantitative advantages become qualitative, which is one of the reasons China’s industrial might has made them a very formidable nation on the world stage.

Now we can look at Ukraine. We should not be funding the war in Ukraine—and we should never have been involved in that conflict. The proponents of prolonging this conflict seem unable or unwilling to grasp the reality that we do not have the industrial capacity to provide Ukraine with what they need, to say nothing of providing for our own needs here at home.

In fact, the Ukrainian Defense Minister said Ukraine needs four million 155-millimeter artillery shells per year, and would use as many as seven million per year if they were available. In 2024, then-Senator JD Vance wrote a piece that correctly identified that after drastically ramping up production, the U.S. could still only produce 360,000 shells per year—less than one-tenth of what Ukraine supposedly needs. Vance was also doubtful of expert claims that we could produce 1.2 million rounds per year by the end of 2025. He was right, and the experts were wrong.

The Army now confirms that the U.S. is only on pace to produce 480,000 artillery shells per year. These aren’t highly sophisticated guided missiles either. Quantity, not quality, ended up winning the day.

Very simply, we must choose to put America first, as we do not currently have the capacity to both arm Ukraine and defend ourselves should the need arise.

Domestic Manufacturing Matters

So let me be candid: our industrial capacity is lagging. The same voices that called for foreign adventurism also hollowed out our heartland and sent our manufacturing jobs overseas. We now face a new choice—rebuild or be left to the ash heap of history. We cannot deter our adversaries if we cannot outbuild them. Our defense industrial base—shipyards, munitions factories, aerospace plants—lags significantly behind our peers, especially China. This is a far cry from the industrial base that won World War II.

Look at the Virginia-class submarine program, which is critical to countering China. The program faces years-long delays. Why? Limited shipyard capacity, supply chain bottlenecks, and a shortage of skilled workers. Chinese shipyards account for more than 50% of global commercial shipbuilding, while the U.S. makes up just .1%. In 2024, a single Chinese shipbuilder constructed more commercial vessels by tonnage than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has since World War II. We cannot deter China in this state of industrial atrophy.

What is of equal if not greater importance is to increase our credible deterrent effect by not just building up the U.S. defense industrial base but, more importantly, by building the U.S. industrial base in totality.

When we say, “If you want peace, prepare for war,” it does not just mean building more ships—it means building our industrial strength and bolstering our society and our families. This will create jobs, secure supply chains, and project strength without overcommitting our forces or wasting our resources.

During World War II, the U.S. was able to retool civilian manufacturing to drastically ramp up military production. Ford and General Motors repurposed their assembly lines to produce aircraft. The Singer Sewing Machine Company converted factories to make precision parts, including cockpit instruments and components. IBM pivoted to produce fire control systems and sights for bombers.

Yet for all of our past glory, the COVID pandemic was a stark reminder of just how badly our domestic industrial capacity has atrophied. Our nearly complete dependence on China to supply more than 80% of the active ingredients in pharmaceuticals gives them serious leverage. China’s ability to wield our industrial weakness against us decreases our credible deterrence over Taiwan and increases the odds of China invading. Are we going to come to Taiwan’s aid if it means that pharmacy shelves across America are suddenly empty? This answer is vital to China’s calculation of whether to invade Taiwan.

Taiwan brings us to another vital manufacturing sector where our capacity is lagging—the semiconductor industry. These chips power everything from smartphones to missile systems, yet the U.S. produces less than 12% of the world’s supply, while Taiwan’s TSMC dominates. If China invades Taiwan, our military and domestic economy will grind to a halt.

This is not theoretical; it’s a ticking time bomb, one that is tied directly to our ability to credibly deter China.

This equation must change. If we can make these chips domestically, our adversaries can no longer use our dependence as a point of leverage. It increases our deterrent effect without having to fire a single shot or put a single boot on foreign soil.

Consider another example (back home for me): Weirton Steel in West Virginia, which was once one of the largest producers of steel in the world. At its peak, Weirton Steel employed 23,000 people. Not only did this help bolster American dominance in steel, but it also allowed families, churches, schools, and communities to flourish. You could buy a home and raise a family on a steelworker’s salary, which allowed mothers to stay home and raise a family and be engaged in their schooling and faith formation.

But the same bipartisan leaders in Washington who decided to put short-term gains over building a thriving domestic industrial base and healthy families signed Weirton Steel’s death warrant. These leaders allowed China to dump cheap tinplate steel into the U.S. market. The steel industry, especially in Weirton, begged President Biden for tariff relief. But President Biden, like most of his predecessors, did nothing. As a result, Weirton’s tinplate steel mill was idled, leaving thousands of workers without jobs and a community gutted. We now only have one blast furnace that makes tinplate steel left in the entire United States of America.

Economic capacity and industrial output are critical in defending the nation and creating a better quality of life. A strong manufacturing sector is in itself a strong deterrent. China understands this. 

The introduction of their “Made in China 2025” policy plan states,

Manufacturing is the main pillar of the national economy, the foundation of the country, tool of transformation and basis of prosperity. Since the beginning of industrial civilization in the middle of the 18th century, it has been proven repeatedly by the rise and fall of world powers that without strong manufacturing, there is no national prosperity.

This is obviously true.

China produces more than half the world’s steel, fueling its infrastructure and military. We’ve let our steel industry atrophy, importing from abroad while our mills rust. This is not just an economic failure; it’s a strategic one. We won World War II in part because we built planes, tanks, and ships faster than the Axis powers could destroy them. A robust industrial base—defense and non-defense—is a deterrent in itself. It signals to adversaries: we can outfight you, outbuild you, and outlast you.

We need a manufacturing renaissance—steel mills, factories, foundries—because a nation that outsources its industry outsources its power. Deindustrialization was a choice—a choice with disastrous consequences. We must now make the choice to rebuild and reindustrialize.

Coal-Powered Success

Now, to have manufacturing dominance, we must unleash energy dominance. Factories don’t run on hope; they run on power—reliable, affordable, and abundant power. Wind and solar power are obviously not able to power anything. We all know that.

Thankfully, America’s superpower is the massive quantities of natural resources we have at our fingertips. We have some of the largest proven reserves of both oil and natural gas of any nation in the world. This is a textbook example of our quantitative advantage becoming a qualitative advantage.

We have the largest proven reserve of coal in the world, nearly double the supply of the next closest country. Our energy potential is unlimited, and we have to drastically ramp up our output if we want to come anywhere close to the energy demands of the economy of the future.

Fossil fuels have long been the backbone of industrial power, and West Virginia’s coal and natural gas are its beating heart. Yet, coal in particular has been under siege, not just from regulations but from corporate ESG policies pushed by firms like BlackRock that waged war on fossil fuels.

Now as State Treasurer of West Virginia, I took a stand: I made West Virginia the first state in the nation to divest our tax dollars from BlackRock. I refused to let Wall Street’s agenda use our own state’s money to kill our coal industry. Today, more than a dozen states have followed our lead, rejecting ESG policies that undermine American energy dominance.

China, meanwhile, builds coal plants at a breakneck pace, powering their industrial juggernaut. They use coal to fuel their steel production while we let our own mines and mills idle. We cannot let this continue.

Thanks to President Trump, we’ve begun to change course. For the first time in my lifetime, a president took a stand for coal, signing executive orders promoting domestic coal production. But we need to go further. We must become a global juggernaut with an “all of the below the ground” approach to energy—coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear must power our path to energy dominance.

America cannot do everything, everywhere, all at once. We are not a nation of infinite industrial capacity, infinite goods, or infinite will. Scarcity—of materials, of capacity, of resolve—forces us to choose. Prioritized Deterrence is a framework for grappling with those choices. It is a commitment to focusing our energies, rebuilding our industrial might, and unleashing the energy to power a 21st-century industrial base. It’s a rejection of overreach in favor of strength, of focus instead of distraction.

Leaders on both sides of the aisle over the last 40 years squandered the inheritance of peace, security, and industrial might in favor of globalization and foreign adventurism. We cannot afford to continue down that path. Correcting course will require open, honest, and sometimes intense debate.

It will require serious investments from business leaders in American manufacturing and public policies that assist in this reorientation. It demands that we do more to appropriately train and equip a skilled workforce. But we must start now. America will build again, power again, and deter again. Not everywhere, not always—but where it matters most, with a strength that none can match.