Depending massively on imports for your most essential needs was always a deal with the devil.
For a while, globalisation made the devil look rather charming.
We convinced ourselves that everybody could be everybody else’s friend. Let everyone trade. Let everyone specialise. Let everyone become richer by producing what they are good at and buying whatever they need from somebody else.
It was an elegant theory.
The problem was never simply the wealth that moved abroad to the countries doing the production. Wealth can be created again. Factories can be rebuilt. Capital can be redeployed.
The far more serious problem is dependence.
You can live quite comfortably while importing something you could produce yourself — right up until the supply route is interrupted.
And suddenly the spreadsheet stops looking quite so clever.
Even ten years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine that major global shipping chokepoints such as the Bab el-Mandeb could effectively be disrupted for any meaningful period of time.
Today, that possibility has become part of the new normal.
And once you accept that supply routes can be interrupted, everything that has been humming away beyond your borders while you quietly depended on it becomes a potential vulnerability.
We got our first serious lesson during COVID.
We discovered that we could not reliably produce even some of the most basic things required to keep a modern society functioning. Wipes. Disinfectant. Simple medical supplies.
The problem was not that these things were technologically impossible to make.
The problem was that we had stopped making them.
When the supply stopped, parts of our societies went into stasis.
That is the real danger of excessive dependence. It does not merely make an economy poorer. It makes the economy brittle.
And when an economy becomes brittle, the consequences eventually reach beyond economics.
Factories close. Services disappear. Infrastructure deteriorates. Confidence evaporates. People begin to discover that the complicated machinery supporting everyday life depends on an extraordinary number of things arriving, on time, from somewhere else.
When enough of those things stop arriving, it is not merely the economy that begins to crumble.
It is the fabric of society itself that starts tearing at the seams.
Not every country has oil and gas.
But many have chosen not even to look for what they possess anymore.
Not every country has enormous hydropower potential.
But even countries that do have it have sometimes made further development so difficult that the resource might as well not exist.
This is the part of the argument that tends to get lost in ideological debates about energy.
We need to use what we have.
And, perhaps more importantly, we need to use what is reliable.
Imports are perfectly acceptable. Trade is not the enemy. Global commerce has created extraordinary prosperity, and there is no reason to abandon it.
But importing something because it is economically sensible is one thing.
Importing something because you have deliberately eliminated every alternative is something else entirely.
The first is trade.
The second is dependence.
And dependence on a supply chain you cannot control, through routes you cannot secure, for goods you cannot easily replace, is not efficiency.
It is a vulnerability disguised as efficiency.
The lesson should be obvious by now.
Keep trading.
Keep importing.
But never make imports the only answer to something that is essential.
Because when the world works, dependence looks like optimisation.
When it does not, it looks like stupidity.