An enormous amount of the self-destructive effort poured into the Trump administration’s global war on trade has been justified on the Rustpolitik theory that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest is a social crisis of sufficient proportions that it delegitimizes the entire national and global economic order and justifies an “anything would be better than the status quo” approach.

Now, I’d submit that you can take seriously the human costs of industrial decline in the region without adopting a Jacobin attitude toward economic revolution. Moreover, the reality is that the problem is not the decline of American manufacturing capacity and production, which are doing quite well overall, and the core of the complaint is not national but regional; a lot of manufacturing work migrated to the South from the Midwest.

But let’s say that you want to focus on the specific problem at hand of insufficient manufacturing jobs in particular communities. You have two choices. One choice is to jack up taxes on American consumers and launch a trade war simultaneously on 90 different fronts, in the hopes that by a long chain of fortuitous events, the economic impact of this will trickle down after some period of years to a renaissance of manufacturing that (without government direction) happens to reach the precise Midwestern communities you are targeting, rather than disproportionately benefiting the Southern locales so despised now by national Republicans. But there’s another choice: more defense spending.

Increasing our domestic budget for building ships, munitions, and all manner of other war matériel is not the most efficient way to produce a stronger, healthier economy. Government spending never is. But then, that’s not the end goal that the Trump administration seeks. A swift expansion of the defense procurement budget is, however, the most direct way for the government to direct large numbers of dollars straight into domestic manufacturing in the places and at the scale of the government’s choosing. If we’re going to have a domestic industrial policy, it makes a lot more sense to do so directly by spending money on the core constitutional function of the federal government than to do so indirectly by means of taxing American consumers and alienating America’s trading partners. And at the end of the day, we strengthen our own defenses. Unless, for some factions, that is something we shouldn’t want.