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The purpose of American foreign policy is to advance and defend the interests of the American people through our engagements with the rest of the world, yet more so than ever before, most Americans see an enormous gap between the U.S. government’s foreign policy and their own realities. In 2024, a plurality of Americans surveyed believed that their country’s limited resources and proliferating problems at home merited a withdrawal from international engagement. The belief that it will be best for the future of the country if America takes an active part in world affairs has steadily declined under both the Trump and Biden administrations, falling by roughly ten percentage points from its 2018 peak of 70 percent. Presidents often pitch foreign policies that will advance American interests and values — they usually fail to deliver.
At a time when Chinese competition, disruptive technologies, and economic disarray make concerns of military readiness and economic prospects abound, it is more pressing than ever for the White House to deliver what the American people deserve: a comprehensive competitive strategy that positions Americans for prosperity in the 21st century.
What is a competitive strategy? It is a whole-of-government roadmap for American success. The United States enjoys a unique system that can balance market forces and government intervention to give everyday Americans a unique shot at prosperity. The success of the American model was never attributed to just one component or the other — it has always benefited most from a carefully calibrated balance of both. This is especially true during periods of great industrial transformation. The New Deal combined public investment and private enterprise to lift America out of the Great Depression, while the postwar boom was powered by both government-backed infrastructure projects and private innovation. Until the mid-1970s, the space race also exemplified this synergy: public funding and private ingenuity working hand in hand to achieve global leadership in science and technology.
In each of these moments, the government recognized an intersectional economic and strategic imperative that neither the private market nor the government could solve alone. In the face of such urgency, leaders crafted targeted incentives and supports that would align our nation’s diverse assets towards the cause of American economic and geopolitical security. Today, America needs its leaders to rise to the challenge once more.
The first major barrier to such a strategy is the misguided framing of a competitive strategy exclusively around containing a rival. Such an approach is bound to fail given that it lacks the right end. The ideal end state of a competitive strategy cannot exclusively be “beating China,” as American families have no inherent interest in beating China — they have an interest in security, economic opportunity, and a high standard of living. The orienting goal of a competitive strategy should thus be the development of an economy that secures the standard of life Americans want and sustains the military needed to defend it.
Today, China’s market distortions, unfair trade practices, and increasingly assertive posturing on both the economic and security playing fields are the greatest external challenge to this goal. A competitive strategy must engage directly with that reality, but it cannot lose sight of the fact that China’s defeat will not secure American prosperity. To achieve the future Americans deserve, leaders must craft a system that is equally prepared to respond to the external threat posed by China and the internal demands of a post-deindustrialization workforce, an affordability crisis, surging energy demand, and rising inequality. This system requires not only novel industrial, economic, and military coordination, but a clarity of intent and resoluteness of focus.
The second major barrier to such a strategy is that too much of American planning happens in silos. The National Security Strategy is meant to articulate our nation’s plan to defend the American people, yet it is drawn up almost completely separately from domestic policy planning and often focuses on thwarting hostile competitors rather than building holistic strengths. It is also updated at least once by every new presidential administration. Countries like China are able to lay out 10 to 20 year plans that align industrial policy, tax and spending plans, military strategy, and diplomatic outreach to set their companies, armed forces, local governments, and individual people up for success.
Critics of democracy have long pointed to this inability to coordinate and plan ahead as a critical failure of the U.S. system of term limits and divided authority, but if the current administration has proven one thing it is that when you combine a strong electoral mandate with effective cross-branch party coordination, major planning and implementation can indeed be achieved. The Trump administration has begun the process of collapsing the traditional boundaries between security and tariffs — the harmonized efforts of the Departments of Defense and Commerce on investments in critical minerals and shipbuilding being excellent case studies — but it has done so without establishing a coherent vision or coalition of bipartisan support that can outlive this presidency.
The third major barrier to such a strategy is the current administration’s determination to pursue American greatness alone. In their recent Foreign Affairs article, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi note the essential role American allies’ resources and industries will play in refortifying America’s geopolitical position vis-à-vis China. They argue that “to achieve scale, Washington must transform its alliance architecture from a collection of managed relationships to a platform for integrated and pooled capacity building across economic, military, and technological domains.” Japan and Korea would build America’s ships, Taiwan its semiconductors, and they would receive military technology in exchange.
We argue that the role of American allies should be taken a step further, promoting dual shore industrial cooperation that not only counts allies’ industrial capacity in our allied scale, but leverages that capacity to rebuild select industries on American soil in exchange for tailored economic and security support. American allies are an under-utilized resource ready to support the rebuilding of a strong America, but they will never fulfill that potential unless the American government builds the requisite framework for them to engage.
What Does It Look Like?
A successful American competitiveness strategy should be thought of through two key components: a domestic investment campaign in essential enabling architecture, namely energy, transit, and skilled labor; and a dual-shoring allied scale strategy that creates bespoke military, trade, and industrial partnerships with our closest partners.
The Domestic Component
As Dan Wang argues in his new book Breakneck, China’s rise has depended less on abstract slogans than on building the enabling architecture for growth: abundant energy, world-class transportation infrastructure, and a highly skilled labor force. America must adopt a similar posture. Affordable, reliable energy is the foundation of industrial competitiveness, lowering costs for factories and giving firms the confidence to invest long-term. Modern transit networks — from ports to rail — are equally critical, ensuring supply chains flow efficiently. And without a workforce capable of mastering advanced technologies, no policy will sustain industrial leadership.
The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science Act, and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act were important first steps toward this model. These laws not only funded clean energy, semiconductors, and physical infrastructure, but also embedded industrial policy into national strategy by channeling resources to sectors vital for economic competitiveness and national security. A year after these acts were passed, there were 601,000 open manufacturing jobs and 449,000 open construction jobs across the country.
These acts also provided investments for workforce development programs that will equip Americans to fill these openings and staff new plants, creating stable, high quality jobs for the middle class. The Trump administration has made novel contributions of its own: pushing allies to invest in American industry, such as the $500 billion AI investment initiative Project Stargate and the Korea-led Make America Shipbuilding Great Again initiative, and taking government stakes in strategic companies including Intel, U.S. Steel, and MP Materials. These reflect a continued commitment to developing vital industries in America.
Finally, American competitiveness cannot be secured without immigration reform. As the September immigration raid that deported 300 Korean expert workers from a Georgia battery plant highlighted, skilled international labor plays a critical but controversial role in American reindustrialization. The incident revealed that allied countries, whose newly pledged investments could bring thousands of jobs and expertise to the United States, are running into an immigration agenda at odds with shared allied goals. Extending professional visas to allied partners committed to American reindustrialization will be essential to supplying the United States with the expertise and trainers needed to achieve its competitiveness goals. A strategy for American competitiveness must embrace immigration as a tool for skills transfer and allied collaboration that multiplies opportunities for new American jobs instead of replacing them.
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The Allied Component
An American competitive strategy must also leverage a unique U.S. asset: its global network of allies. For much of the postwar era, the United States anchored its partnerships on defense obligations, while economic cooperation unfolded in parallel or was delegated to multilateral regimes. In today’s era of rising nationalism around the world, alliances require a broader basis of support grounded not only in defense arrangements but also in shared industrial and sustainable economic gains on all sides.
Military cooperation, which has historically constituted formal alliances, remains essential — European partners to deter Russia, Japan and Australia to balance China, India to anchor South Asia, and South Korea to contain North Korea — but it is no longer the extent of the value proposition alliances offer the United States. In an era defined by technological competition, supply chain vulnerabilities, and economic coercion, alliances must play a role in driving industrial strength, geoeconomic resilience, and middle-class prosperity. The question is not simply how allies contribute troops or basing rights, but how they contribute to the productive capacity that underpins power.
Trade alignment is a vital component of successful alliances. A healthy trading strategy recognizes that the United States cannot, and should not, produce everything. But while competitive markets, not autarky, drive growth, they break down when players employ state-subsidized overcapacity, forced technology transfer, discriminatory standards, or export controls to influence global trade dynamics. In this environment, universal tariffs threaten American consumers and alienate allies more than they protect American interests.
Joint defensive trade measures, including collective tariff barriers to hostile dumping, shared monitoring of supply chain manipulation, and jointly imposed export controls, would allow allies to maintain a level playing field for their domestic industries without giving up on decades-long economic integration that has driven global development. The United States has already participated in partial frameworks of this kind, from the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council to the U.S.-South Korea-Japan Trilateral Supply Chain Early Warning System. These initiatives prove that allies can align standards, coordinate investment screening, and collectively respond to detrimental market distortion behaviors. What has been missing, however, is a coherent strategy that connects these disparate efforts to a unified allied economic vision that promotes a global economic environment in which the American economy can thrive.
Industrial cooperation is one of the most underdeveloped pillars of American partnerships around the world, even as the Trump and Biden administrations have made groundbreaking efforts to capture its potential. The key is to recognize that many of the industries shaping global power are networked ecosystems that no single country can rebuild alone. Strategic industries require advanced skills, capital pools, reliable inputs, and stable long-term demand. In many of these areas, America’s allies hold capabilities where the United States faces bottlenecks. Korea leads in shipbuilding, batteries, and memory chips. Japan dominates in robotics and precision manufacturing. Australia holds potential in critical minerals. Europe innovates in green industrial technologies. A sound competitive strategy should turn these complementary capabilities into a shared ecosystem that strengthens U.S. capacity while solidifying allied economic autonomy.
Consider shipbuilding, an industry where American military and commercial capability has eroded to a level that threatens operational readiness. The United States accounts for only 0.13 percent of global output, while South Korea (29.24 percent) and Japan (17.25 percent) command nearly half, following China. A competitive strategy would establish a holistic framework where allied shipyards receive multi-year navy and coast guard procurement contracts, while foreign shipbuilders provide design integration, process engineering, and technical supervision to scale up production in America, providing “win-win-win” scenarios for allied defense, American workers, and allied firms. This model emphasizes co-designed, predictable, rule-based cooperation rather than coercive conditionality. An education pillar could add durability to these efforts, such as establishing a joint academy pairing allied firms with U.S. community colleges and union training centers, rebuilding a domestic workforce capable of staffing the industrial expansion. These mechanisms, procurement guarantees, shared training pipelines, and technical integration, embed allies into U.S. reindustrialization in a politically durable way.
Semiconductors present a similar logic. Korea leads in memory production, Japan in materials, and Europe in photolithography and precision manufacturing. A competitive strategy would establish a coordination board through which the United States, Korea, Japan, and key European partners align subsidies toward complementary segments of the supply chain rather than competing through duplicative programs. Joint packaging research and development hubs, harmonized export-control measures, and shared intellectual property rules would allow allied firms to operate across jurisdictions without navigating conflicting regulatory burdens. Such industrial agreements should be considered integral parts of defense ties rather than ancillary economic agreements, as defense readiness cannot exist without industrial capacity.
Upstream, recently signed U.S. agreements with Japan and Australia on critical minerals point to the merits of a similar logic. The United States should not aim to monopolize the mining or refining of critical minerals. It should help allies better suited to reclaim market share develop those capacities at world-class standards, and expect in exchange that allies contribute to the development of downstream American industries in which the United States enjoys comparative advantages: defense manufacturing, shipbuilding, and next generation energy like hydrogen, nuclear, and geothermal power. In doing so, each alliance amplifies the competitive advantage of its two parties, creating self-sustaining critical supply chains. Allied countries gain market share in a high value, high growth sector, the United States gains supply chain security and both monetary and material resource inputs for regrowing domestic industrial base, and the collective alliance’s economic and military strength is solidified. Arranged as such, alliances can build parties’ complementary strengths, advance each nation’s independent domestic agenda, and establish a stronger joint position for the alliance.
While the current administration has made attracting foreign investment in American industries a priority, it has often done so by using the cudgel of tariffs to coerce such agreements. Such an approach, while securing short-term wins, is inherently short-sighted and narrow-minded in nature. Allies will not forget that they entered many of these agreements under duress, and such maneuvering risks them working hard in parallel to reduce their vulnerability to such American strong-arming in the future. Europe’s push for “strategic autonomy,” Canada’s localization of key supply chains, and Southeast Asia’s diversification efforts all reflect this hedging behavior driven by the concern over the strings attached to the alliance with the United States.
Still, U.S. allies have substantial motivations to want a strong America. In many theaters, American military and economic might is an essential shield or counterweight to an increasingly assertive China or expansionist Russia. American strategy should recognize these preexisting inclinations, while not becoming complacent. To continue working with the United States, allies must believe their economic and military fates are better off intertwined with America than not. Fortifying this belief requires the military, trade, and industrial benefits of modern alliances to flow in both directions.
Conclusion
A competitive strategy for the 21st century must transcend the reflexive impulse to undercut competitor economies and instead focus primarily on investing in the domestic and allied capabilities that make Americans prosperous and secure. This entails investing in the foundational infrastructure — energy, transportation, and human capital — that enables industry to flourish. It means treating allies not merely as security partners but as co-investors in shared industrial strength. And it means recognizing that America’s greatest advantage has always been its ability to combine market dynamism with strategic government action at moments of historic transition.
This framework of driving domestic investment in enabling architecture, paired with multidimensional allied partnerships, offers one pathway forward. But implementation will require political fortitude and institutional coordination that have eluded recent administrations. It demands that policymakers resist the temptation to plan in isolation, that they synchronize economic and security policy across agencies and with allied governments, and that they measure success not by adversaries constrained but by Americans empowered.
Arjun Akwei is a former affiliate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University.
Jinwan Park is a nonresident fellow at the European Centre for North Korean Studies, University of Vienna, and co-founder of the U.S.-ROK-Japan Trilateral Next-Gen Study Group.
Image: Midjourney
