The ubiquitous corporate "five-year plan" is not a benign business tool; its conceptual creator was Joseph Stalin for managing the Soviet Union. This framework is fundamentally ill-suited for a dynamic, capitalist environment, routinely failing because its iteration cycle is too slow. The persistence of this model represents a "hand coming out of the grave" of central planning.

Politicians predictably declare initiatives for domestic production of critical goods like munitions or rare earths when dependencies are exposed. However, these declarations rarely translate into effective action, suggesting we must learn to manage economic entanglement as a form of mutual deterrence rather than wish it away.

The concept of a five-year plan, common in large corporations and government procurement, was created by Joseph Stalin for the Soviet Union. This rigid, top-down model routinely fails because it cannot adapt to a dynamic world and stifles the rapid iteration necessary for innovation.

The push to build defense systems in America reveals that critical sub-components, like rocket motors or high-powered amplifiers, are no longer manufactured domestically at scale. This forces new defense companies to vertically integrate and build their own factories, essentially rebuilding parts of the industrial base themselves.

The West's Cold War fear was that countries would fall to communism one by one. Ironically, the domino effect occurred in reverse. Once democratic reforms began in Poland, the movement spread rapidly, causing the entire Soviet empire in Eastern Europe to crumble.

In the final weeks of WWII, the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria and dismantled its industrial infrastructure, shipping home the vast majority of its power, mining, and metalworking equipment. This industrial base should have gone to China, which had fought Japan for 15 years, not Russia.

In the Soviet system, factory managers consistently lied about inventories and needs to meet quotas. These falsehoods were aggregated up the command chain, resulting in fundamentally flawed national data. The government was therefore blind to the true value of capital, labor, or consumer demand, leading to catastrophic misallocations.

While Reagan's military buildup is credited with ending the Cold War, post-war data revealed the USSR was spending 40-70% of its GNP on defense—not the 20% the CIA estimated. This miscalculated overspending made economic collapse inevitable.

When trade policies force allies like Canada to find new partners, it's not a temporary shift. They build new infrastructure and relationships that won't be abandoned even if the political climate changes. The trust is broken, making the economic damage long-lasting and difficult to repair.