For decades, the United States bet on globalization and free markets—a wager it has lost, argues Oren Cass in a new essay from the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. “Far from producing a utopia of shared prosperity and stable peace,” the international order Washington fostered “contributed to economic and social decay” at home, he writes.
Instead, the United States should seek to build “a sustainable trading and security bloc” whose members are “committed to engaging with each other on comparable terms while jointly excluding others that will not fulfill the same obligations,” Cass writes. Countries hoping to join would have to “take primary responsibility for their own security,” pursue “balanced trade,” and shun China as a trading partner. With this “humbler and more realistic strategy,” Cass concludes, “Washington would finally be placing a bet that the United States can win.”
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