Hormuz has made painfully visible what happens when governments are left to improvise. The Trump Administration scrambled to set up a government-backed insurance program through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or the DFC, that has so far failed to restore transit through the Strait. European and Asian allies, cut out of decision-making before the war began, have been left competing with one another for scarce energy deliveries, with some turning to America’s adversaries for supplies.
A Taiwan crisis would move faster and cut deeper than anything we have recently experienced, and the cost of incompetent improvisation would be far higher. The work that matters now is not designing punishments for China. Everyone understands that a genuine geopolitical crisis with China would be economically devastating to both sides.
The harder, and more necessary, task is building the kind of economic resilience that makes coercion a losing proposition in the first place. That means allied stockpiling of semiconductors and other critical inputs that cannot be quickly substituted. It means pre-negotiated crisis logistics agreements, so that allied militaries and merchant fleets can resupply one another without weeks of bureaucratic delay. And it means rigorous supply chain coordination—joint planning so that allied governments know which factories, shipping routes, and financial systems are most vulnerable, and have fallback arrangements in place before the crisis hits. That work must begin now, before we are tested again.
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