To close out the summer, we’re sharing a 2022 essay by the scholars Jenna Bednar and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar on the growing power of U.S. states. The conventional understanding that the United States’ federal government sets the entire country’s policy direction and “bears sole responsibility for foreign affairs” is “both flawed and out of date,” they argued.
In areas such as artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and renewable energy, states are gaining far more influence than is generally recognized, “particularly in an era of partisan gridlock in Washington.” California, for instance, has set emission standards for cars that have changed the behavior of automakers nationwide and has negotiated a cap-and-trade agreement with the Canadian province of Quebec.
State-level policymakers and foreign leaders alike must consider the fact that the United States is not merely “a vast entity with presumed national interests” but also “an archipelago of powerful, competing jurisdictions,” Bednar and Cuéllar wrote. “Increasingly, the story of U.S. democracy and U.S. leadership abroad will depend not only on developments on the shore of the Potomac but on how Americans and the world understand that archipelago.”
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