The New Pessimism

Talks in South Korea between US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping on Thursday went as expected: the two leaders negotiated away from confrontation rather than toward it. The transactional nature of current US foreign policy is sometimes over-rated, but in the case of China it is clear, and China’s leadership is more than ready to behave similarly, transaction by transaction. Given that China has for many years been identified by Trump as the leading challenge to American status globally, his reconciliation with Xi suggests that moral arguments about the US’s duty to lead its allies in opposing authoritarian government and promoting free markets are being left behind. This was the contention of two important commentaries last week by Michael Beckley and Ian Bremmer. SIG’s view is that the domestic crisis Bremmer identifies and the US’s “rogue superpower” behavior (Beckley) will last well into 2026 but then moderate. The reasons are the same as the ones that led Trump to make a deal with Xi: a lack of better options.

Ian Bremmer, founder and head of Eurasia Group, sees US President Donald Trump as leading a domestic “political revolution” that could involve “the kind of political chaos, realignment, and violence that America saw in the decades after the Civil War.” On the international side, Beckley, of Tufts and the American Enterprise Institute, sees the Trump administration as caught up in “the same logic of raw power that helped spur two world wars…What looms is not a multipolar concert of great powers sharing the world, but a reprise of some of the worst aspects of the twentieth century.” These are loud alarms from highly credible people.

Bremmer and Beckley are both what American political science calls “realists,” with political views somewhere on the center-right. Ian Bremmer started Eurasia Group in 1998 in Manhattan, just four years after earning his doctorate in political science at Stanford. (His dissertation was on the ethnic politics of Russians in Ukraine.) In his 2015 book Superpower, Bremmer wrote, “I’m proud to be a political scientist, one who takes seriously his responsibility to offer unbiased analysis. I’m also intensely proud to be an American….I love my country.” Growing up in a rugged part of Boston, with multiple and varied heritages in his ancestry, Bremmer, like numberless Americans before him, developed a profound sense of the US as uniquely a land of opportunity for all. He also saw it as having a unique and positive international role, although by 2015 he had turned against a “superhero foreign policy.” He mainly thought the US should lead by democratic example, rooted in the constitution. (“Congress is the guarantor of our security and our liberties. The president, every president, must respect its authority.”) Although in 2016 he called Donald Trump “a buffoon…willing to use racism, xenophobia, and all of the worst and basest impulses” to gain power, Bremmer generally stuck to foreign rather than domestic politics. Nonetheless, a certain type of constitutional democracy at home was seen as the essential basis for leading by example overseas.

It is the “replacing” of “the rule of law with the rule of Don” that led Bremmer to write last week that “a constitutional crisis before the next elections looks increasingly likely.” If the American system has become personal rather than constitutional, then it can no longer lead by example. So Bremmer now speaks of a “post-American order” in which other nations cannot expect American leadership, even by example.

Michael Beckley made his name with Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (2018). He had been advised as a PhD student by America’s international-relations royalty: Richard Betts, Andrew Nathan, and Robert Jervis. Beckley offered a very compelling argument that China’s prospects were over-rated and the US’s strengths were under-rated. It was read as an argument against US defeatism. Beckley, like Bremmer, was against US military problem-solving abroad. His worry, two years into the first Trump administration, was partisan division leading to the loss of “America’s purpose”: compared to fighting fascism or communism, “maintaining the liberal order may seem like an underwhelming call to greatness….But it is just as virtuous and just as vital.”

Seven years later, writing in Foreign Affairs, Beckley finds that, “As liberal democracy corrodes at home, liberal internationalism is unraveling abroad. In a world without rising powers, the United States is becoming a rogue superpower, with little sense of obligation beyond itself…. U.S. strategy is shedding values and historical memory, narrowing its focus to money and homeland defense. Allies are discovering what unvarnished unilateralism feels like, as security guarantees become protection rackets and trade deals are enforced with tariffs.”

Bremmer and Beckley are determinedly level-headed, experienced, deeply engaged political scientists at the top of their games. They both conclude that the US is falling apart at home, which in turn means that its status as a world power is also falling apart.

How does the Trump-Xi meeting look in this light?

They talked for two hours. Trump said Taiwan did not come up and that China signaled a desire for cooperation on Ukraine. The Chinese readout mentioned neither. The public takeaways included a US reduction in tariffs (and threatened tariffs) in exchange for additional Chinese measures to hinder exports of ingredients in fentanyl, an opiate that has become a leading killer of Americans who use it recreationally. China agreed to lift its ban on imports of US soybeans, returning them to roughly the same quantity as before the recent trade war. The US indicated it would ease restrictions on exporting to China advanced silicon chips, notably those produced by Nvidia. The Chinese readout said that the US had agreed to suspend for a year the implementation of a new rule targeting subsidiaries or affiliates of companies on the US Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security’s list of proscribed companies (Entity List) and military-related end users (MEU List). The first list is about 70% Chinese companies; the second is entirely Chinese companies. China in turn suspended for a year its export controls on rare earths and associated products going to the US. 

In all of these, the US seems to have been at a disadvantage. On soybeans, US farmers suffered the loss of a market while China diversified its soybean suppliers; the result of Thursday’s talks was at most a possible return to pre-tariff US soybean export levels.

Fentanyl-related tariffs were announced by the White House on February 1 under the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). They were paired with “illegal aliens” as twin aspects of a “national emergency” invoked in order to apply tariffs to imports from China, Canada, and Mexico. The declaration of a national emergency was necessary in order for the executive branch to gain the authority to impose the tariffs. (The administration cited the same emergency IEEPA authority for the April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs, with high US trade deficits said to constitute a “threat to the national security and economy of the United States.”) Now the fentanyl tariffs are to be reduced in the case of China.

What was missing from the statements and readouts on Thursday was anything about fentanyl use itself — which is the legal basis for the White House’s imposition of the tariffs. Non-fatal fentanyl overdoses actually ticked up from January to June 2025 then declined into August, but they remain where they were when the tariffs were first applied. By contrast, fatal drug overdoses, the majority linked to fentanyl, have been dropping steadily since August 2023 and are now at about the same number as in April 2020. On the first figures, the fentanyl tariffs have been a failure, so why revoke them? On the second measure, the overdose emergency itself has been abating steadily for two years, with the pace seemingly unaffected by the tariffs, so why retain emergency powers at all?

On silicon chips, export controls have been based on national-security grounds, as were Liberation Day tariffs. The same was true of the proposed expansion of BIS Entity List and MEU List powers. These measures have now been suspended or possibly rescinded. So is China now less of a threat to the US?

China’s suspension of its rare-earths export controls was its only significant move and it seems provisional. (China did not suspend its rare-earths controls from April, only the new rules announced in early October and not yet implemented.) China’s strategic management of its rare-earth resources and capabilities has been a consistent feature of its foreign policy since it suspended such shipments to Japan in 2010 over a maritime dispute. A one-year suspension of a new export protocol again, as with soybeans, represents a return to the status quo more than a concession. And as Rush Doshi said on Bill Bishop’s Sinocism podcast yesterday, the rare-earths sector is mainly controlled by a tiny number of Chinese companies that defer to government direction. That tap can be turned on or off at any time.

The import of the Xi-Trump negotiations, then, is not so much in the rather insubstantial terms themselves but in what the talks imply about the Trump administration’s power. It was playing a weak hand from the beginning. China still controls 90% of the rare-earths supply chain. The US was bargaining with soybeans that could be purchased elsewhere, tariffs that are already being priced in and hurt US firms and consumers as well as Chinese suppliers, and technology exports that have already proved difficult to control and for which China is very energetically developing substitutes.

But Trump’s hand was also weak in a different, possibly more important way that puts the grim prognoses of Bremmer and Beckley in an interesting light. It isn’t just that the national-security justifications for presidential tariff powers and export controls have been revealed as opportunistic. It is that Congress has begun to push back in this slow-burn constitutional crisis. As the White House is keenly aware, the Senate resolved, on the heels of the Xi-Trump meeting, that the “national emergency” invoked on Liberation Day was over. This followed two earlier Senate resolutions to oppose tariffs imposed by the White House on Brazil and Canada. In short, Trump was bargaining with Xi partly on the basis of powers that a Senate majority said the president did not have. (Those powers will be reviewed by the Supreme Court as well, on November 5.) It is worth recalling that it was also the Senate that rejected (by 99 to 1) the White House’s bid to forbid states from regulating AI. Senators this week will have noted that the president’s approval ratings have slipped and, perhaps more important, independent voters have swung toward blaming the president and the Republican party for the government shutdown that just reached its thirtieth day. (The record is 35.) At the same time, there is no indication that Congressional Republicans or Democrats have concluded that China no longer poses the threat to national security that inspired BIS and other tech export controls or that Xi has been cowed. Or that China’s control of the rare-earths supply chain has really been weakened.

Bremmer and Beckley were abundantly justified in raising the alarm over America’s ongoing constitutional crisis and its implications for US foreign and economic policy. But they might have called the fight a bit too soon.

The Market for Tech Containment

Recent moves by Microsoft and the Chinese government marked a new stage in the years-long process of tech decoupling, a SIGnal preoccupation. Meanwhile, the US and China are moving toward what might be significant high-level talks — and the US bull market continues, fueled by AI valuations that are dependent on American dominance of the AI future. None of these three elements seem at all stable. Even tech decoupling could be upended if US President Donald Trump decides to favor a megadeal that would bring Chinese investment into the US. The markets and the politics are both frothy indeed. SIG’s view has long been that AI technology as such will transform industrial processes and much else. A related but quite separate question is whether the massive investment into data centers, understood as the infrastructure of AI, is really necessary for the AI future. “Infrastructure” has a reassuringly solid sound, but if the much-anticipated burst of the AI bubble occurs then data-center capex is where the deflating is most likely to happen.

Microsoft’s withdrawal from China received less attention than it deserved. Bill Gates and his company have long been more pro-China than most of Big Tech. Microsoft’s China labs were crucial to China’s acquisition of AI expertise and experience. That is much of why China’s leader Xi Jinping mischievously greeted Gates as an “old friend” in Beijing in 2023, seven years into a bipartisan consensus that China was the pacing challenge for American security and the US economy. Microsoft’s withdrawal began late in 2024 and has continued through this year. The shuttering of its Shanghai AI lab early in 2025 was done very quietly but it reversed decades of company policy that had done much to create China’s AI industry in the first place. In short, when Microsoft decouples it really means something.

At the same time, China made a strategic shift this month with comprehensive restrictions placed on Chinese companies to prevent use of US silicon chips. This hit Nvidia particularly hard. Its share of the China market plummeted from 95% not long ago to 50%. Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, has done everything he can to hold on to what he still has. He is said to have the ear of President Trump. But the reprieve Huang secured in July seems to have been eliminated by China’s new moves. When China decouples at this scale, it really means something. 

Tech decoupling is a secular trend. It is the central force behind the current trade tensions, which both China and the US have been escalating, each placing the blame on the other. President Trump’s retaliatory tariffs, set to take effect November 1, responded to China’s weaponizing (not for the first time) of its tight grip on rare-earths production. All these moves revolve around the perceived centrality of AI to victory or defeat in the geoeconomic struggle between China and the US.

The two countries are nonetheless continuing talks. China hawks in Washington and elsewhere are genuinely worried that President Trump’s love of the grand gesture will combine with the influence of Jensen Huang and others to undermine the structure of tech containment built up in recent years. They might well look to Trump adviser Peter Navarro for reassurance. He has been ringing the bell about the China threat for 20 years. And indeed at the Council on Foreign Relations on Friday Navarro spoke of how the president’s tariff negotiations have already resulted in “19 trillion dollars” of promised investment: “foreigners are going to be paying to fix the vulnerabilities in our supply chain,” and once they have done so there will be a global “level playing field.” He also said that the US pre-Trump had “shipped 19 trillion dollars of our wealth” overseas. Nineteen trillion out, 19 trillion back in, and balance is restored. That is the idea. Navarro believed China’s new rare-earths policy is showing the world that China is everyone’s enemy: “The world will not go back to sleep on this.”

But if a three-year bull market, grounded in speculative bets on building data centers to set the infrastructural stage for future AI-driven productivity gains, wobbles enough, trade wars with China could lose their appeal. Tech containment and tech decoupling, though, will continue.

Changing Patterns of Foreign Direct Investment

The McKinsey Global Institute has published a report on patterns of foreign direct investment (FDI), specifically greenfield (new project) investment. It is both a thorough and  a methodologically innovative report. Interestingly, the report rather buries its headlines. This might well be because the MGI, like McKinsey itself, to the limited degree that it has a political perspective, is for efficient global markets based on mainstream economics, and therefore “for” globalization. It is not the McKinsey Institute for Successful Economic Nationalism. Given that this is an era dominated by economic nationalism, the MGI’s commitment to political neutrality probably makes it hard to rank its findings by significance.

For example, is it good news or bad news to show that announced greenfield FDI flows into China have decreased by 70 percent since 2022, in the teeth of Chinese policy? Is that finding more, or less, important than the related finding that Chinese outward FDI investment is dominated by what MGI calls “future-shaping industries,” which mainly means AI data centers? Similarly for the US, the report finds that announced inward greenfield FDI has soared but it is mainly in semiconductor manufacturing and, again, AI data centers. The report also notes the huge role of Gulf Cooperation Council countries such as the UAE and delicately acknowledges that much depends on “the ultimate form of trade deals between the United States and its partners.” It would take a brave investor to decide with confidence what that form would be or indeed whether those deals will ever have an “ultimate form.”

Another possible headline might have been built around the finding that FDI announcements in advanced economies other than the US have been anemic since 2024, with data centers barely picking up the slack from drop-offs in energy and advanced manufacturing.

Yet another headline is in the finding that announced greenfield FDI investments in 2025 (to May) “in each of the emerging Asia, Latin America, MENA, and sub-Saharan Africa regions are at 20-year lows….FDI investments across these regions have fallen by 50 percent from their levels during the 2022-24 period, on an annualized basis.” So while total global FDI has grown, it has gone down in all the poorer parts of the global market, as well as barely straggling along in most advanced economies.

This could be seen as a victory of sorts for the US and the Trump administration, if victory is measured by the signing (not execution) of deals in AI data centers and semiconductor manufacture. However, the Trump administration gained power with promises to bring back traditional manufacturing, and the MGI report finds investment in that sector plummeting nearly everywhere in the world, including the United States.

There are several other possible headlines that could be gathered from the MGI report, which amounts to a map of the intentions or hopes of mega-scale capital. (The corporate drivers in the report are dominantly major multinationals signing megadeals — yet another headline.) In a crowded field, SIG’s own choice would perhaps be that investments in low-emissions technology, which doubled from the 2015-2019 period to 2022-2024, have fallen by 70 percent in 2025 for low-emissions hydrogen and offshore wind. Other energy forms have remained about the same or, as for conventional fossil fuels, gone down. Geothermal and nuclear announcements have more than doubled but from such a relatively low base that “they hardly dent the aggregate energy FDI numbers.”    

What this suggests is that even the biggest investment decisions made by the largest corporations having (as with energy companies) the longest and deepest experience of greenfield FDI are being decisively shaped by political developments, above all in the US and China but also in the Gulf. If the political winds of January-May 2025 were to change, as they almost certainly will, then further massive shifts in FDI flows will also occur.

So both investment capacity and policy influence, when it comes to global greenfield FDI flows, are being concentrated and profoundly politicized. That clearly does not mean that they are becoming more predictable, only that there are fewer decision-makers. In the global struggle for political-economic power, this could mean that victory will go to the major power that is most stable and predictable, which is presumably China. The high degree to which Chinese multinationals, as the MGI found, are engaging in greenfield investment outside China — as well as, of course, outside the US, where they are not currently welcome — also suggests as much.

The Nine Lives of Economic Nationalism – Part Four of Four

Earlier posts in this series considered the multi-century trajectory of economic nationalism in reaction to empire, the resurgence of import substitution and major-power resource competitions, and the ways in which major-power economic nationalisms have made non-market-based economic development policies more popular than they have been in decades, almost regardless of levels of industrial development or economic size.

This final post considers some likely near futures of economic nationalism and economic sovereignty, with particular attention to AI.

First, the United States. The US was born in a determination to end external imperial dictation of economic policy and has, for the most part, guarded a relative autonomy from other economies ever since. The unification and then expansion of the 13 colonies across the continent integrated conquered territories into a “domestic” economy in a way that had few comparators elsewhere in the world. The resulting extent of US natural resources, from fresh water to arable land to natural gas, also proved to be unique. The US was peculiarly well suited to economic sovereignty, and with large-scale immigration it was able to grow on domestic demand better than anywhere else. Exports therefore accounted for a relatively smaller share of GDP than was the case in other industrial countries.

The constraining factor in the US case was not a lack of petroleum or fresh water or food but labor productivity. This was addressed through numerous means, from transport infrastructure to compulsory public education to industrialized agriculture. It helped that the US economy, unlike other industrialized economies, benefitted from both world wars. Productivity entered a crisis in the 1970s. It was eased, in a way, by the Internet and industrial globalization: your wage might be stagnant but it bought much more. But that improvement depended on production outside the US under working conditions that would be rejected in the US itself.

The extraordinary US investment in artificial intelligence comes from this.  AI holds out the promise of increasing productivity. But will it be global productivity or national productivity? Differently put, will the gains be captured by transnational capital and consumers or by tax-paying domestic markets and citizens? Will it be international or nationalist? Low unemployment, very slow job creation and high government and corporate debt all suggest that, absent an AI productivity miracle, the US will head into recession. That might well make the American people more nationalistic and insistent on economic sovereignty, but economic nationalism will not be able to solve their problems.

Chinese economic nationalism faces other constraints. A shrinking workforce and resistance to immigration mean productivity gains will have to come from labor-saving technology and investment in the non-Chinese global workforce. The first would be economically nationalistic. The second would be more like what US companies did in the 1980s and 1990s, and it could hollow out the Chinese jobs market as it once did the American. This would fuel the popular appeal of economic nationalism but, again, economic nationalism is not likely to be able to solve China’s labor productivity problems. An AI productivity miracle would help China as it would help the US. But it would be a miracle.

AI looks different outside the US and China. Those two countries thoroughly dominate the AI space. In AI terms, most other countries are takers, not makers. Africa’s population, a bit larger than China’s, captures 2.5% of the global AI market and is expected to attract 0.3% of global AI investment. The European Union attracts 7%. Britain, Canada, Israel and India also have significant investment, with Britain’s spend twice that of Canada’s. Nonetheless, the US and China attract 80%, with four fifths of it in the US. If an AI productivity miracle occurs in the existing economic-nationalist environment, it is difficult in political terms to imagine the benefits being rapidly diffused across the globe, since the goal of the investment is roughly the opposite.

AI aside, the resurgence of discredited 1960s-era development economics, from “national champions” and import substitution to infant-industry protection and tariffs, is becoming widespread. These policies were celebrated by the Left half a century ago as a way to withstand US corporate domination. Today their appeal is close to universal. They are even seen in the US as ways to ensure the US domination that they were once meant to block.

The essential point seems to be sovereignty. It is a phenomenon rich in paradox. The US-led Internet boom made possible a globalization that dramatically increased the wealth of once-poor countries, above all China but also India and others. These states could then afford to oppose what had just made them wealthy and to revive policies that had not helped them at all the first time around. China, India and other once-colonized nations wrap this in a rhetoric of anti-imperialism while hurrying to lock up poor-world resources before their once-imperial competitors do.

This is the central reason why China’s alternative global-governance schemes will go only so far: they are motivated by economic nationalism. Yet the same is true of US, Indian and European efforts, although European economic nationalism plays out on two levels at once, the national and the supranational. The major EU reform initiatives of 2024 were all premised on consolidating nation-based sectors into a super-nation capable of competing with the US and China.

For investors, at the national (or for the EU, supra-national) level, the play is in policy arbitrage, which is also political arbitrage. At the global level, as between major economic-nationalist actors like China, the US, India and the European Union, it makes sense to hedge with presences in at least two, navigating the relationship in each market among affirmative industrial and financial policy, protection, and market-based competitiveness. (A simpler way to do this, of course, is to invest in multinationals and funds with the proven capacity to do this kind of multi-market navigation themselves.) Beyond that, in countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia, which aim at economic sovereignty but lack much of what is necessary to achieve it, there are opportunities in the state-favored sectors themselves, the import and domestic sectors that provide the necessary inputs (such as electricity and raw materials), and the export sectors that ultimately make imports possible.

Little of this was featured in business school and Adam Smith would be appalled, but for the time being economic nationalism is the way of the world. 

The Nine Lives of Economic Nationalism – Part Three

Part one of this series discussed the roots of modern economic nationalism in anti-imperialism, then went on to consider how US-Chinese economic nationalism has scrambled established ideas about both empire and economics. Part two examined two cases in Africa: the first involved two formerly colonized countries (India and China) competing for dominance of resource extraction in other formerly colonized countries; the second focused on the successful import-substitution (oil refining, cement, fertilizer) companies of Nigeria’s Aliko Dongate and his new, $2.5 billion fertilizer-production deal with Ethiopia. In both posts, the through-line was the defense of national economic sovereignty in a world deeply interconnected through trade.

The third post in the series looks at the blowback created by US-China economic nationalism.

The first case of blowback must surely be the US reaction to Made in China 2025 itself. The original Chinese program was a sovereignty play. China did not want its economic future (green energy, smart manufacturing, biotech, etc.) to be dominated by US companies with massive first-mover and other advantages. Made in China 2025 was a project aimed at economic self-determination. It did not cause much concern at first in the US: President Barack Obama met China’s President Xi Jinping for positive talks in 2016, after the project had been launched, and visited him again in Beijing in 2017 after leaving office. But Trump’s signature economic nationalism, once he settled into the White House in 2017, gradually fastened onto Made in China 2025 as a legitimizing opponent. Much of corporate America and the Democratic Party went along with this, for reasons of their own. The economic nationalism of a still relatively poor country — Chinese GDP per capita in 2015 was less than a third of what it would be in 2025 — begat the economic nationalism of the dominant economy in the world.

The US elaboration of economic nationalism in reaction to, and often in imitation of, Chinese economic nationalism inspired similar reactions elsewhere, most notably in the world’s most populous nation, India. In May 2020, while Trump was still in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a Made in India campaign. He made free use of a term, swadeshi, deeply resonant of the anti-imperial movement a century before. It was probably Modi’s move, combined with the breakout of border conflict with China (also May 2020) and the ensuing expulsion of Chinese tech companies from the Indian networks they mostly built, that led China to reframe Made in China 2025 in a longer history of anti-imperialism and attempt to rival India as a leader of the Global South.

The die was cast. An economic nationalism, including import substitution and “food sovereignty,” that had seemingly left the world stage in the early 1970s was back, led by the two dominant economies in the world and its most populous nation.

At the same time, the US, China and India all knew that actual isolation from the global economy was impossible in any imaginable near term. Modi’s atmanirbhar (“self-reliance”) coincided with much closer relations with the US and US companies, for example, including military and tech cooperation, right up to Trump’s sudden and wrenching disenchantment with India in August of this year. US economic nationalism was also not just about autonomy in North America. It involved, for example, throttling Chinese export industries and doing whatever was necessary for “locking in dollar supremacy,” in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s words, to preserve “extraterritorial power.” Similarly, Chinese self-reliance (zili gongsheng) developed alongside a lengthening list of quite internationalist projects, from the Belt and Road Initiative to promoting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a pseudo-NATO. Each of these large economic powers preached economic nationalism but also practiced internationalisms of various kinds and showed no actual desire to stay contentedly within its borders tending its own gardens.

Yet if major-economy economic nationalism in practice had a strong internationalist cast, it was nonetheless nationalistic in terms of the barriers erected against foreign participation in domestic economies. It was also exceedingly transactional, before Trump’s re-election and all the more so after. Friendly meetings at the beginning of September of this year among Modi, Putin, and Xi were often spun — not least by China — as evidence of an emerging international unity when faced with US trade and security policies. But there were no principles involved beyond sovereignty itself, and each of these actors, as well as Trump, has shown himself able to switch sides at will, and to switch back again.

So the sensible conclusion for countries in the rest of the world is to avoid alignment with any of these changeable states and to pursue their own self-sufficiency (“economic sovereignty”) — because you really never do know any more when your foreign supply chains will be reshaped by political policies over which you have no influence.

Economic nationalism fosters more economic nationalism. The unpredictability created by economic nationalism among major players — including the European Union with its quest for “autonomy” and resistance to becoming a US tech “colony” — has come to outweigh the profound efficiency costs. Better to slog through building your own fertilizer or cement industry or AI “stack” than give up what autonomy you have to politicized global markets.

The fourth and final post in this series will consider the future of economic nationalism.