The plan combines three main elements. Interest rates are kept low. Tariffs are imposed broadly. Tax cuts are concentrated at the top. These policies interact in predictable ways. They ease federal debt service, raise the price of traded goods, and shift after-tax gains toward higher-income households. Each element reinforces the others. The result is a coherent economic strategy, but one with clear distributional costs.

The rule of law is often invoked as a shield against power. Yet the paradox is that law itself generates the conditions in which power moves most freely. To grasp this, one must set aside the familiar scene of diplomats arguing at the United Nations or judges issuing unenforceable rulings from The Hague. Those are the most visible but least effective parts of the system.

The United States put a price on national security and called it a fee. A 15 percent export duty was floated on shipments of technology that had been banned months earlier. At the same time, officials threatened sweeping tariffs on semiconductors, on goods that contain them, and even on the tools that make chips; and they reopened sales of Nvidia’s H20 to China in the midst of tense bargaining over rare earths. Reports that summer described these moves in detail, showing how controls—once insulated from bargaining—were folded into trade talks. In a matter of months, national-security rules had become negotiable.

The European Union’s competition policy is often portrayed as a brake on growth, as if fines and rules designed to curb the power of large firms inevitably constrain scale. This view mistakes the relation between enforcement and growth.

By most measures, the world economy has held up under strain. Global trade as a share of GDP is stable, shipping volumes remain high, and production networks continue to stretch across regions. This outward steadiness gives the impression of continuity. Yet beneath the surface, the shape of flows is changing.

For more than seven decades, the U.S. dollar has sat at the center of the international financial system. Its depth, liquidity, and the credibility of U.S. institutions made it the default reserve currency and the medium through which much of global trade was conducted.

In political life, the absence of action is rarely the absence of choice. What looks like hesitation or indecision is often the outcome of a structure that makes inaction appear natural, even necessary.

For much of modernity, trade was seen as a structured system of reciprocity, governed by rules, stabilized by norms, and shaped by shared expectations.

With debt at 100% of GDP and harmful trade barriers, U.S. crisis response capacity erodes, threatening safety nets from 2008 and 2020, carrying major implications for business leaders.