Trump’s economic plan for America

A non-imperialist proposal for strengthening the national economy

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Among the numerous executive orders and memoranda signed by Donald Trump on January 20-21, some amounted to the formulation of a non-imperialist proposal for strengthening the American economy. These include “Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living,” “America First Trade Policy,” and “Unleashing American Energy.”

The Trump administration maintains that families are overwhelmed by the cost of fuel, food, housing, automobiles, medical care, utilities, and insurance as a result of excessive government deficit spending, which artificially increases demand, combined with government regulations that constrain American production. There are, for example, regulations based on politically and ideologically driven interpretations of the impact of various forms of energy production on the environment, when actual impact on the environment is negligible. In addition, government mandates have resulted in higher prices for gas-powered vehicles, favored by consumers, to subsidize the production of electric vehicles. In addition, housing construction regulations increase the cost by twenty-five percent. It is estimated that, during the Biden administration, government regulations imposed an average additional cost of nearly $50,000 on American households.

The President signed a memorandum on price relief that directs the relevant departments and agencies to develop policies that lower the cost of housing and expand the supply of housing, eliminate counterproductive requirements that raise the cost of home appliances, eliminate “climate” policies that increase the cost of food and fuel, and create employment. The Assistant to the President for Economic Policy is to report to the president in thirty days, and every thirty days thereafter, on progress in the implementation of the memorandum.

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America First Trade Policy

The Trump administration proposes a trade policy that puts the American economy, American workers, and U.S. national security first, further developing initial steps taken by the first Trump administration. It proposes a trade policy that promotes American productivity and enhances the nation’s industrial and technological advantage, to the benefit of American workers, manufacturers, farmers, ranchers, entrepreneurs, and businesses.

The “America First Trade Policy” memorandum directs the Secretary of the Treasury to investigate the causes of the nation’s large and persistent annual trade deficit in goods. It directs the Secretary of the Treasury to investigate the feasibility of establishing an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs and duties. It directs the United States Trade Representative to review and identify unfair trade practices by other countries; to assess the impact of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on American workers, farmers, ranchers, service providers, and other businesses; to recommend any revisions that may be necessary to attain or maintain “reciprocal and mutually advantageous concessions with respect to free trade agreement partner countries;” and to identify countries with which the United States can negotiate bilateral or sector-specific agreements to attain access to foreign markets, thereby providing additional markets for American companies, farmers, ranchers, service providers, and other businesses to sell their goods and services.

The memorandum directs the Secretary of the Treasury to review and assess the practices of U.S. trading partners with the respect to the rate of exchange between their currencies and the U.S. dollar and to recommend measures to counter any currency manipulation that undermines American balance of payments or provides trading partners with an unfair competitive advantage.

The “America First Trade Policy” memorandum also directs the United States Trade Representative and the Secretary of Commerce to assess all policies and practices with respect to the People’s Republic of China. They should ensure that China is complying with the current agreement between the USA and China. They should investigate any policies and practices by the PRC that are unreasonable or discriminatory and may burden or restrict U.S. commerce. They should assess legislative proposals for normal relations with China and make recommendations. They should investigate the question of U.S. intellectual property rights with respect to the People’s Republic of China and make recommendations that “ensure reciprocal and balanced treatment of intellectual property rights” between the two nations.

We should note that there is here no accusation against China as a supposedly authoritarian nation. There is no indication here of an ideological agenda or a New Cold War with China. With recognition of the important global fact of the rise of China, and with a suspicious attitude concerning the willingness of the U.S. political establishment to defend American interests, Trump is proposing a balanced and mutually beneficial relation between the two giants.

In recent decades, the nations of the Global South and East have increased their capacity to defend their interests, greatly reducing the one-sidedness of the first six decades of the twentieth century, when the United States with superior economic and military power could set the terms of agreements in accordance with its imperialist agenda. And said nations have increased their capacity to defend their interests since the 1980s, when the International Monetary Fund took advantage of the Third World debt (itself provoked by the practices of Western banks) to impose economic policies in defense of Western interests. As this tendency toward the increasing power of the South and East became more and more real, the U.S. corporate elite, having little in the way of national identity and possessing an indifference to the wellbeing of the people, responded to the situation by defending the interests of large corporations and not the U.S. national economy and the people, which set the direction of the American political establishment of both major political parties.

Trump is responding to this betrayal of the nation and the people by the corporate elite and the political establishment. He wants to review all existing agreements with other nations and ensure that the interests of the American economy and the people are protected.

Trump proposes an approach that is not imperialist. He proposes agreements that include “reciprocal and mutually advantageous concessions” among nations, which is exactly what the anti-imperialist nations of the Global South and East have been proposing during the last quarter century, with China and Cuba playing leading roles, and Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Bolivia also serving as key actors in an emerging anti-imperialist process. These nations as well as international organizations of states such as the Non-Aligned Movement are calling for mutually beneficial trade among nations, the terms of which should be negotiated on a basis of mutual respect.

In addressing the national security dimension of U.S. trade policy, the “America First Trade Policy” memorandum does not refer to enemies, as is common in U.S. public discourse, but to “strategic adversaries or geopolitical rivals.” The memorandum directs the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Commerce to ensure that the United States is not exporting strategic goods, software, services, and technology to the nation’s strategic rivals and their proxies. And it directs them to “make recommendations regarding how to maintain, obtain, and enhance our Nation’s technological edge.” I would like to emphasize here that this call for maintaining American advantage through the development of its technology and productive capacity radically departs from U.S. imperialist national security doctrines of the last century and a quarter, in that it does not propose maintaining American advantage by interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, but by developing its productive capacities.

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Unleashing American Energy

The Executive Order “Unleashing American Energy” maintains that “America is blessed with an abundance of energy and natural resources that have historically powered our Nation’s economic prosperity. In recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these resources, limited the generation of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced job creation, and inflicted high energy costs upon our citizens. These high energy costs devastate American consumers by driving up the cost of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing, while weakening our national security.” The Trump administration proposes to unleash America’s natural resources, in order to restore American prosperity, rebuild the national economy, and strengthening military security, which will enable peace through strength.

“Unleashing American Energy” announces a policy of encouraging energy exploration and production on Federal lands and waters, thereby solidifying the position of the United States as a global leader in energy production. And it announces a policy of establishing the United States as the leading producer of non-fuel minerals, including rare earth minerals, which would strengthen U.S. supply chains.

The executive order directs all heads of agencies to review all existing regulations, orders, and policies, for the purpose of identifying regulations and policies that “impose an undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources — with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.” The agency heads should initiate action plans that involve suspending, revising, or rescinding all current agency actions that are identified as unduly burdensome.

The agency heads are also directed to implement regulations that expedite the approval of permissions to exploit natural resources on federal lands and waters. In analyzing permissions, the agencies ought to give priority to efficiency and the certainty of results over other objectives, including the objectives of activist groups. All delays in the permitting process ought to be eliminated. In addition, the construction of interstate energy transportation, including pipelines, ought to be facilitated. “Agencies should work with project sponsors to realize the ultimate construction or development of permitted projects.”

The executive order “Unleashing American Energy” is guided by the belief that current analyses of the environmental impacts of energy production use methodologies that are arbitrary or ideologically motivated. It mandates that only the most robust available methodologies of assessment should be utilized. It states that U.S. policy now guarantees that “all executive departments and agencies provide opportunity for public comment and rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific analysis.” It disbands the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, and it withdraws recommendations to use its estimates of the social cost of greenhouse gases. It maintains that the recently favored methods of calculating the so-called social cost of carbon are “marked by logical deficiencies, a poor basis in empirical science, politicization, and the absence of a foundation in legislation.” It considers the use of ideologically driven methodologies to be an arbitrary abuse of regulatory power that renders the U.S. economy internationally uncompetitive. It directs the EPA to issue new guidelines and to consider the elimination of the “social cost of carbon” calculation. All agencies should ensure that assessments of changes in the level of greenhouse gas emission are consistent with the Regulatory Analysis guidelines emitted by OMB in 2003.

I personally am not in a position to know if the “social cost of carbon” calculations are valid. However, I would say that, based on my observation of the unscientific and politically motivated character of government regulations in areas in which I have more knowledge, combined with the evident unidimensional approach and non-empirical speculations of many ecology activists, I do not have confidence in the government regulators in place at the end of the Biden administration, and I am not prepared to discount the accusations of the MAGA movement on this matter. Therefore, taking into account the current political-economic crisis of the United States, I would maintain that the proposal for the unleashing of energy should proceed, for the economic benefits that it would likely bring, but accompanied by careful scientific observation and correction, as needed. No sovereign nation would or should take steps that seriously restrict its economy without clear evidence that the economic practices in question have long-term negative consequences for humanity.¹

The executive order also directs the Secretary of Energy to restart the review of applications for approval of liquified natural gas export projects. It maintains that in assessing “Public Interest,” the Secretary of Energy should take into account the economic and employment benefits of said projects.

The executive order envisions the restoration of America’s mineral dominance. It directs various agencies to identify existing regulations and policies that impose unnecessary burdens on the mining and processing of non-fuel minerals. In addition, it directs the Secretary of the Interior to give priority to “efforts to accelerate the ongoing, detailed geologic mapping of the United States, with a focus on locating previously unknown deposits of critical minerals.”

Complementing the executive order “Unleashing American Energy,” the President signed a separate executive order, “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.” It notes that the State of Alaska has an abundant supply of natural resources with respect to energy, minerals, timber, and seafood. However, this abundance is untapped, as a result of federal violations of the sovereign right of the State of Alaska to develop these resources for its own benefit and for the benefit of the nation. The executive order, therefore, reverses numerous restrictive measures that have been imposed on Alaska. It announces that the policy of the nation is to “efficiently and effectively maximize the development and production of the natural resources located on both Federal and State lands within Alaska [and to] expedite the permitting and leasing of energy and natural resources projects in Alaska.” It directs the heads of all executive departments and agencies to revoke or revise all regulations that are inconsistent with the new policy on unleashing Alaska’s resource potential, including cancellations of previously approved leases within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; it directs the agencies to initiate additional leasing through the Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program.

In support of the executive order “Unleashing American Energy,” President Trump issued a separate executive order declaring a national energy emergency, in which he declared that the nation’s capacity to produce, transport, refine, and generate energy is far too inadequate to meet the needs of the nation. The order directs heads of executive departments and agencies to “identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them, as well as all other lawful authorities they may possess, to facilitate the identification, leasing, siting, production, transportation, refining, and generation of domestic energy resources, including, but not limited to, on Federal lands.”

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Further considerations

The proposal of the Trump administration is non-imperialist. But it is not anti-imperialist. Neither Trump nor the MAGA Movement could possibly formulate an anti-imperialist proposal, because they do not possess anti-imperialist consciousness. Indeed, public discourse of the United States lacks anti-imperialist consciousness, at least since the period 1966 to 1972. As a result, the Trump administration is unaware that its proposal for mutually beneficial trade between the USA and other nations is consistent with the proposal of the socialist and anti-imperialist nations of the Global South and East for mutually beneficial trade among nations.

Latin American journalists, academics, and political leaders are not seeing the non-imperialism of the Trump proposal. They see threats against Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Russia and the placement once again of Cuba on the arbitrary and spurious list of countries that supposedly sponsor terrorism, and they conclude that the United States is about to embark on a new era of imperialist expansionism, even though the issues in play in the four nations are distinct from the question of the sustainability of American imperialism, and the question of Cuba has distinct political dynamics in the USA. I think that Latin American critics should look more closely and see the Trump administration’s turn to non-imperialism and its expression of hope for world peace. And they should call upon the Trump administration to be true to its word. They should proclaim the possibility of common ground between Trump’s America and the other America of the South, on a basis of mutual respect for sovereignty and mutually beneficial trade as the best possible foundation for world peace.

I believe that it is an error for Latin America to denounce Trump for a supposed turn to a renewed American empire. It should see the shift in direction, which is necessarily shaky, because the United States is tentatively moving toward non-imperialism, a place that it has never been, except perhaps for its founding generation. Latin America should see the shift and embrace it, calling on the Trump administration to search with them for common ground, seeking a region and a world that build peace and prosperity on its only possible foundation, that of respect for the sovereignty of all and mutually beneficial trade among nations. Latin America should announce the possibility of a new era of win-win.

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1. In “Putting the Worst Green Ideas in the Dustbin of History” (Persuasion, January 24, 2025), Quico Toro writes:

“The green consensus overturned by Trump’s executive order was badly built around a series of half-baked ideas that create serious problems when you try to implement them. . .. For a decade, mainstream environmentalism has been organized around a simple formula: electrify everything, then switch electric generation to renewable sources, especially wind and solar. This was the guiding spirit of Biden’s landmark climate law, the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Trump is especially keen to dismantle. The IRA’s central plank was a series of juicy tax incentives to subsidize wind and solar production, setting off a boom in generation capacity that was supposed to revolutionize American energy markets.

“Pushed with great enthusiasm by activists who didn’t really understand the nuts and bolts of energy markets, the rush towards weather-dependent renewables carried risks that are only now being recognized. Intermittency—renewables’ propensity to flake out when the weather isn’t cooperating—turned out to create complications the climate movement hadn’t properly thought through. For all the hype, hydrogen and grid-scale batteries are far from being ready to take up the slack. Renewable-heavy grids, it turned out, only work if backed up by hugely expensive back-up power sources, usually reliant on fossil fuels. Wherever regulators pushed up the share of renewables in the grid, prices rose, price volatility rose, and grids became more fragile.

“This was foreseeable, and ought to have been foreseen. But ideology is a hell of a drug, so the unthinking push towards unstable, unaffordable energy picked up steam around the world. The places that have gone farthest in this direction have ended up with some of the world’s highest and most volatile energy prices. Energy intensive manufacturing has begun to flee these places, which figures: who wants to run a factory where the cost of energy depends on the weather forecast?

. . ..

“A small but growing dissident movement within the climate community—sometimes called ‘energy realists’— increasingly argues that energy abundance is absolutely non-negotiable in the fight against climate change: voters won’t stand for climate policies that pick their pockets and leave them in the dark in the middle of winter. Nor should they.”