By john 
For almost four decades, the dominant dogma in U.S. economic thinking was that markets self-correct and the state’s job was simply to minimize friction. There Pokemon787 was no need to shape industry — let price signals, global arbitrage, and capital efficiency decide. But the U.S. is now rewriting that doctrine in real time. The political economy of industrial strategy is no longer a fringe academic conversation. It is now the center of American power architecture. The IRA, CHIPS Act, Defense Production Act expansion, export control redesign, and national procurement direction represent a structural pivot: Washington is redesigning production geography and technological hierarchy — not just competing, but deciding what kind of economy America will be in 2030 and 2040.
This new industrial policy is not “protectionism,” as critics often reduce. It is power calibration. The U.S. not only wants to secure critical domestic capability for AI, semiconductors, clean energy, and bio manufacturing — it wants dependency asymmetry. The U.S. is designing conditions where rivals require U.S. access more than the U.S. requires theirs. That shift — dependency inversion — is the material objective.
This also resets alliances. Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, UK, Canada are not only diplomatic partners — they are now industrial coalition partners. Industrial alignment becomes national security alignment. Trade becomes deterrence. Value chain architecture becomes a new form of extended security perimeter. You do not need military bases when you control the substrate of production.
And yet, a counter risk emerges. Industrial policy of this scale centralizes power and national discretion at levels the U.S. system has not used in decades. It means more political discretion in selecting winners. And that means the domestic internal politics will intensify — states will fight each other, lobbying will escalate, and the definition of “national interest” becomes a battlefield.
This is the new U.S. political economy phase: a hybrid model of market capitalism with state-led strategic direction. The U.S. is no longer defending globalization framework — it is designing a new one that is asymmetric, selective, gated, and strategically exclusionary. The real world implication: the U.S. wants the future to be built on American-designed choke points — not just American-friendly values.