American Mandate: Build, Protect, Promote

Strategic industrial, trade, and investment policies must advance three interlocking spheres: Building our industrial base, Protecting it from predatory traders, and Promoting American products and standards worldwide.

Introduction

Tectonic geoeconomic plates are shifting under the world's feet daily. Strategic industrial, trade, and investment policies are powerful tools Americans can use to empower our economic and national security. Advancing core American interests will require complementary and interlocking strategies guiding actionable tactics in three key spheres — building our industrial base, protecting it from geopolitical and economic threats, and promoting deployment of American products, technologies, and standards worldwide.

The United States maintains a central position at the crossroads of geoeconomics and national security. Discussions around commerce — from shale gas to soybeans — are now seamlessly embedded with security considerations. Ongoing securitization of U.S. trade and investment policy requires balancing of unilateral interests and actions with realistic acknowledgement of when, and how, the United States should operate in cooperative frameworks with trusted partners and allies.

Robust bipartisan debate has confirmed, in a view approaching consensus, that empowering the U.S. industrial base cannot be constrained by multilateral structures designed for an allegedly benign, bygone era. An American Mandate should be based, first and foremost, on domestically identified priorities for economic security.

America and trusted partners are venturing deeper into a changed geoeconomic landscape that requires redesigned approaches to geoeconomic competition. Partners that decline to join the United States in proactively building and protecting connected domestic industrial bases and supply chain resilience will be at the mercy of countries that have spent decades amassing capacity and power to dominate markets.

KEY OPPORTUNITIES FOR ACTION: 1.) Review of the USMCA due in 2026 2.) Ongoing Section 232 and 301 investigations related to China's predatory model and other unfair trade practices 3.) Modernized customs procedures to illuminate supply chains and enable targeted border measures 4.) Congressional and executive branch policy designs for reindustrialization through trade and investment

Balanced Policies Compound Benefits

Advancing balanced policies requires recalibrating engagement of predatory countries to ensure that U.S. competitiveness and prosperity is no longer undermined by countries whose practices undermine both U.S. interests and a broader global economic system based on markets, fair play, and good-faith conduct.

The three decades since China's 2001 accession to the WTO have provided critical lessons in how damage within market economies in industries like steel, aluminum, and solar manufacturing cannot be allowed. Painful experience in competing with state-supported Chinese firms should inform forward-looking plans for the industries of the future like artificial intelligence, clean-firm power, and advanced transportation.

Durable success in each sphere of the American Mandate requires supportive success in the other two. The next decade is a critical period to work toward balanced advancement of all three spheres across a range of critical industries.

Build: Strengthening America's Industrial Base

The United States must build advanced industrial capacity and infrastructure so that both cutting-edge and foundational industries can thrive, especially industries that are essential to national security. We cannot permit damage to core U.S. interests enabled by outdated openness to predatory actors.

The U.S. private sector is without doubt the greatest economic engine in history. Technological advances and increased investment required to compete in advanced industries nonetheless warrant reconsideration of how the private and public sectors can collaborate to build durable foundations for growth. U.S. government resources must be efficiently leveraged to position American firms and workers to succeed in areas including physical and IT infrastructure development and applied research.

SPOTLIGHT: FUSION ENERGY China has since 2023 provided as much as $13 billion for fusion energy projects, including creation of the state-owned China Fusion Corporation. The United States must not cede an industry as promising as fusion for lack of will to compete. Fusion energy exemplifies how balanced public-private cooperation is increasingly essential in advanced industries where scale of required capital expenditure has led to underinvestment.

We must acknowledge a competitive landscape in which state actors drive commercial outcomes. China's rapid-fire December 2024, April 2025, and October 2025 expansions of restrictions on exports of dual-use goods and critical minerals portends a world in which inability to produce goods essential for security equates to national negligence. Building U.S. capacity in advanced and foundational semiconductors is thus a matter of national survival.

China's industrial plans evince its predatory ambitions. It has for over a decade targeted domination of the global semiconductor market, providing tens of billions of dollars of state support. Price undercutting and export prohibitions on critical minerals including gallium and germanium are core tactics of its market-share domination strategy.

Protect: Defending American Industry

As we rebuild American industry we must simultaneously protect current and future production capabilities in industries whose very existence is threatened by neo-mercantilists' trade and investment practices, especially fledgling investments in the industries of the future that are particularly vulnerable to economic and geopolitical manipulation.

The U.S. market is based on bedrock principles of fair competition and rule of law. Safeguarding U.S. industries from illegal, non-market trading practices and state-directed exploitative investment is therefore crucial to U.S. national interests. No private firm can compete with the resources and reach of nation-states, especially in the long run.

While competition with minimal protection may yield the greatest economic gains in textbook theory, 21st-century geoeconomics proves that countries willing to distort markets can outcompete countries that rely on the sanctity of free markets. The medium and long-term hard-economic benefits from protecting our labor, fixed capital, and manufacturing far outweigh short-term soft-economic benefits to maintaining openness to competitors.

CRITICAL SECTORS REQUIRING PROTECTION: Industries ranging from high-capacity batteries to efficiently produced steel and aluminum face existential threats from global price suppression driven by non-market capacity expansion abroad that is untethered to global demand signals. This dynamic is particularly acute in the aftermath of global macroeconomic shocks when market share capture is most easily achieved by firms not subject to hard budget constraints.

Interventions to protect competitive existing industries and investments in the industries of the future are essential for long-term U.S. prosperity and security. Protection should not be excessive or applied in cases where not necessary. Harmful trading practices should be offset without weakening fair and constructive competition for actors willing to compete on a level and transparent playing field.

Promote: Expanding America’s Global Reach

The United States must finally promote exports and influence of American products, technologies, and standards throughout the geopolitical playing field. Achieving this objective requires constructive trade and investment relationships with key allies and partners that facilitate mutually beneficial economic expansion.

The vast majority of the world's consumers live outside U.S. borders and that share increases each year. Expanding middle classes throughout Asia, Latin America, and Africa are ideal customers for U.S. exporters, production partners in global value chains, and producers of goods and services Americans value. Reaching those households with best-in-class American products, technology, and standards is therefore an essential piece of achieving balanced and equitable international trade.

GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT IS STRATEGICALLY CRITICAL: Any U.S. strategy lacking external trade and investment engagement would cede influence to predatory actors seeking to maximize control through global market capture, especially throughout the global south. Establishing predictable, rules-based U.S. partnerships in markets at all levels of development can strengthen the strategic and economic alliances that foster 21st-century global prosperity.

The ongoing broad global reconfiguration of supply chains toward more dependable suppliers and efficient market-oriented production methods sends a clear demand signal for next-generation products that U.S. policy seeks to build out — such as large-capacity batteries for grid energy storage and the semiconductors that undergird myriad industries. American policy around which production capacities to build and how to protect them must be informed by key trading partners' production and consumption objectives.

Conclusion: Planning for Performance

The need for a new American Mandate is urgent due to unprecedented geoeconomic shifts that are to some degree beyond U.S. control. America does, however, control the plans we make and actions we take to deploy productive, protective, and internationally engaging policies for the future.

Policymakers can benefit from the lessons of failures of the past three decades of global integration to most successfully ensure a thriving U.S. industrial base that is not at risk from predatory powers and which benefits from beneficial engagement of trusted allies and partners.

MEASURING SUCCESS: The United States must maximize allies’ and partners’ contributions to American efforts around advancing a modernized order in which citizens of cooperating economies can thrive through market-based trade and investment while taking complementary actions to protect our economies from predatory actors and advancing shared prosperity.