As the U.S. struggles with how to balance the economic priorities of national security and low costs, the favored terminology keeps shifting. First there was “offshoring”—transferring production abroad to save money. Then there was “onshoring” or “reshoring”—bringing production back home to reduce the potential for disruption of supply chains. The latest lingo is “friend-shoring” or “ally-shoring,” which is similar to reshoring except that it’s not restricted to domestic production. Reliable friends and allies are also deemed OK as sources.
The new, more inclusive terminology is only a year or so old. Last year, Elaine Dezenski and John Austin wrote an article for Newsweek that credited Bonnie Glick, who served in 2019-20 as deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, with privately using the term “allied-shoring.” (Glick seemed to endorse their attribution by tweeting out the article.)
“We’d like to call it ‘ally-shoring,’” wrote Dezenski, who’s a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Austin, who’s a nonresident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, in the Newsweek piece. “Ally-shoring means leaning into economic partnerships with those who share our values and strategic interests. It means rebuilding our economy with nearby friends with whom we already have tightly wound production and business service networks, such as Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, and American territories like Puerto Rico and Guam.”
The Biden administration adopted “ally-shoring” and spun it into “friend-shoring” in a 250-page report released this month titled Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth. The report notes that some crucial materials simply aren’t available in the U.S. “Methods of guarding against single-source risk in the critical minerals supply chain, for example, is limited in part by where natural resources exist. Tools including ally- and friend-shoring, and stockpiling, along with investments in sustainable domestic production and processing will all be necessary to strengthen resilience.”
In a follow-up blog post for Brookings published this month, Dezenski and Austin write that ally-shoring will strengthen the economies of the U.S. and its allies and that “working together to rewire supply chains and co-produce high-tech products in emerging sectors will serve to rebuild bruised alliances and U.S. global economic and political leadership, as well as check China’s bid to extend their own authoritarian economic and political model across the globe.”
As language, ally-shoring and friend-shoring are ugly ducklings. The -shoring suffix is nearly as overused as -gate (Watergate, Spygate, Pizzagate, etc.). Politically, though, they occupy a rare sweet spot of bipartisan agreement in Washington. In a new column for the journal Foreign Policy, Edward Alden, a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes about the Senate’s approval of a $250 billion bill to build U.S. leadership in key technologies such as computer chips, 5G wireless, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
“Astonishingly in an era of gridlock,” Alden writes, “the bill had significant bipartisan support, winning votes from 19 Republican senators who were largely motivated by the growing economic and security threat from China.”
Like it or not, in an era of intensifying great power rivalry, the new shoring lingo is likely to stick.
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