What Would an Abundance Foreign Policy Look Like?

To succeed, an abundance agenda cannot stop at the water’s edge: It needs a foreign policy to complement its domestic goals. This means averting production disruptions and supply chain snarls abroad and leveraging Washington’s global influence to drive abundance at home. Domestic abundance requires dependable international inputs, including materials, technology, and talent. In a world of intense competition, natural-resource constraints, and the rise of punitive tariffs and other coercive tactics, a thriving, relatively self-sufficient economy is a prerequisite for not just domestic stability and prosperity but also national security.

Post-Trump Washington will face betrayed allies, ascendent populist authoritarianism, a tariff system in disarray, and atrophied international institutions. A new administration will confront a world that is dubious of U.S. leadership and an American public still struggling with affordability and Washington’s empty promises. As would-be policymakers peer ahead and imagine a world beyond Donald Trump, an abundance foreign policy could help sharpen their vision for the future.

In the years to come, a state’s power will depend on its ability to break chokepoints faster than they can be created by either rivals or force majeure, such as natural disasters and pandemics. An abundance foreign policy must therefore emphasize strategic and largely nonideological geoeconomic statecraft in seeking to further U.S. growth. Rather than aiming to run or remake the world, a foreign policy of abundance should make U.S. economic strength and broad-based prosperity its first order of business, banking that bounty and stability at home are prerequisites for the United States to thrive in the world.

A core premise of abundance is that support for Trump’s Make America Great Again platform is, at least in part, driven by public anger at the loss of high-wage jobs, rising prices, and the elusiveness of the American dream. The theory is that if the United States can reboot its public sector for the 21st century, demonstrating anew that the country is capable of solving problems and bettering lives, a more cohesive and steady democracy will emerge.

The domestic abundance agenda holds that many of the United States’ gnawing scarcities—including affordable housing, energy, modern infrastructure, and health care—derive from restrictive rules, cumbersome processes, legal hurdles, and institutional weaknesses that hamstring both the public and private sectors. Abundance proponents advocate paring back regulation, limiting legal challenges, and streamlining consultation processes to make it easier to break ground and build what communities most need. To clear bottlenecks, government and markets must prioritize quantifiable outputs that better lives, such as the number of housing units built, clinics opened, and megawatts brought online.

Foreign policy has the potential to either support or spoil this vision. Thirty-two percent of the inputs for U.S. infrastructure are sourced from abroad. The United States is almost entirely dependent on imported uranium for nuclear fuel, net import-reliant for most critical minerals, and heavily exposed to China-dominated supply chains for critical-minerals processing.

A United States mired in scarcity, aging infrastructure, and political sclerosis will struggle to project power globally. Watching China scale high-speed trains, automated factories, electric vehicles, and robots has led opinion leaders to raise the alarm that the United States is falling behind. The narrative of Chinese authoritarian prowess and relative stability saps Americans’ morale and tarnishes the U.S. image by comparison, seeding doubts about the benefits of an open, rights-respecting form of government. If the United States cannot revive faith in its system as the engine of a thriving society, belief in democracy will further suffer.

The country’s global credibility will not be restored through the soaring rhetoric of the Barack Obama years, Joe Biden’s turn to humility, or Trump-style bravado. Instead, it will rest on competent leadership that projects confidence, generates tangible benefits for allies, fortifies the country’s economic position, and fosters domestic stability. An abundance agenda would combine a focus on global competitiveness with getting the United States’ act together at home, building a record of technological breakthroughs, social progress, and infrastructure advances. These triumphs would rebut a narrative common in policy circles that democracies are failing their populations.

More than merely an adjunct to domestic policy, abundance is also a national security doctrine. Formidable, flexible industrial capacity—at home and through reliable allies—can dissuade adversaries from economic and military aggression. Advanced technology and manufacturing will be crucial to national defense. The ossified U.S. industrial base is ill-equipped to produce the artillery, long-range strike munitions, interceptors, rockets, and sea vessels needed for comprehensive deterrence. A tight focus on clearing bottlenecks and building smoother, swifter production could make the country not just more prosperous but more secure.

Key parts of such policy thinking have gained hold among recent Democratic and Republican administrations, which have worked to safeguard the U.S. technological edge, build industrial capacity, and secure key supply chains. Abundance offers a unifying framework and set of governing principles to concretize such measures into a long-term, overarching, and potentially even bipartisan doctrine, moving past stale debates over free trade and globalization.

To be clear, an abundance lodestar cannot dictate a full U.S. foreign policy; it will not answer every question concerning how to defend an ally, protest a human rights abuse, deploy a carrier, or deter a threat. But it can provide an overarching strategy. An abundance foreign policy would ask of every major international affairs decision: Does it expand the U.S. capacity to build—cheaply, quickly, and at scale—without sacrificing core security and values?

The first priority of an abundance foreign policy should be to expand and diversify supply chains. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a worldwide supply web vulnerable to unpredictable shocks, demand swings, and autarkic turns by key partners. Today’s world operates under what political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call “weaponized interdependence,” where nations that control key goods and hubs flex power over rivals.

Both Biden and Trump have focused on this phenomenon. Navigating COVID-19 and Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Biden administration prioritized supply chain diplomacy, onshoring and friendshoring production to address vulnerabilities and lessen dependence on China. It pioneered assertive industrial policy, including the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act. Trump’s tariffs and foreign-policy moves have, in part, been driven by a similar impulse to weaken China’s global hand. Both administrations have worked to augment U.S. access to critical minerals through domestic production and global partnerships.

An abundance foreign policy would turbocharge these efforts, aiming to fine-tune procurement and supply chain machinery to scale output in key industries such as construction and advanced manufacturing. The government would enlist private sector experts to find inventive ways to surmount output constraints such as lead times, factory capacity, and customs delays.

Recent episodes offer insight into what this work might entail. Last November, South Korean solar company Qcells furloughed 1,000 workers in the state of Georgia due to customs delays. In recent years, routine tariff adjustments on Canadian timber have risked compounding the U.S. housing shortage. Both cases highlight the importance of swiftly identifying, avoiding, and solving bottlenecks that impede economic growth.

The U.S. government can ensure the steady supply of crucial building materials—including lumber, transformers, and cables—through predictable tariff policies, early warning systems for shortfalls, expedited dispute resolution, and pre-clearance of qualified imports. Review processes to scrutinize sensitive foreign investments should be triaged to fast-track abundance-related projects. Washington should keep markets open by default and use import restrictions only at true chokepoints, where China’s dominance creates credible national security risks.

The abundance approach recognizes that public consultation and input matter—but that overindexing for organized interests can undermine broader public confidence in a government’s ability to deliver. In practice, abundance-oriented governors in California, New York, and elsewhere have sought to speed permitting and construction while keeping labor and environmental protections intact, often by negotiating clear rules up front. On a national scale, Washington could, for instance, take a coordinated approach to siting and permitting to support electricity demand for artificial intelligence. This would both address environmental considerations and avoid forcing suppliers, including international partners, to navigate byzantine local zoning rules.

The second order of business is to ensure abundance over the long term by pushing the United States to the forefront of innovation. Recent administrations have seen trade policies backfire on this issue, including Biden-era tariffs on clean energy imports and Trump’s punitive tariffs that have reduced U.S. manufacturing jobs. Today’s economic diplomacy is a game of three-dimensional chess, demanding a level of know-how, scenario-building, and foresight akin to military planning.

China has become the world’s undisputed manufacturing power, leading in areas from chips and data center hardware to energy and grid equipment. This could eventually translate into an insurmountable competitive advantage, especially as Beijing pursues long-term strategies for dominating sectors including AI, quantum computing, robotics, and biotechnology. Now, Washington must not only play catch-up but position itself to lead in the decades to come. Successful incentives to jump-start U.S. chip manufacturing and battery production should be extended to other crucial fields such as quantum and robotics.

Scrambles for supremacy in the seabed, the Arctic, and outer space will help determine access to mineral mining, energy supplies, and satellite infrastructure. To compete in these realms, the United States must match China’s long-term strategic approach, collaborating with allies on joint stockpiles and infrastructure projects such as upgrading Arctic ports and repairing undersea cables. Long-term investments in ventures such as the Lobito Corridor—a U.S.- and European-backed project that seeks to connect copper and cobalt mines in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a port in Angola—will also be needed to secure key inputs.

Expert U.S. engagement in key standards bodies will be crucial to these endeavors. Far more than Washington, Beijing’s approach to the AI race is focused on diffusion, or the spreading of Chinese technology worldwide to box out U.S. players over the long term. When U.S. technologies set the standards for safety, reliability, and interoperability, they cement a competitive advantage. The Biden administration was alert to China’s ambitions in this space and created a Standardization Center of Excellence funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Trump’s withdrawal from multilateral institutions and NIST funding cuts have weakened Washington’s influence in this battleground.

Technological competitiveness also depends on talent. Visa restrictions and cuts to federal research grants are pushing scientists and technologists overseas. To speed up talent pipelines and recapture lost time, Washington should partner with allies in Europe and elsewhere on reciprocal approaches to research visas, professional credentialing, and joint research training. The expansion of highly skilled visas should be paired with aggressive strategies to train and credential more Americans to fill well-paid jobs in tech and advanced manufacturing.

The third leg of an abundance foreign policy requires fortifying a global order favorable to U.S. goals. Alliances, rules, and institutions have underpinned U.S. success for 80 years, while multilateral bodies, humanitarian agencies, and blocs such as the G-20 have tempered the tumult of conflicts, natural disasters, and financial crises that places burdens on Washington as a global leader. Historically, the United States has flourished in complex markets founded on rules that play to its strengths—where allies are trusted, contracts hold, intellectual property is protected, and disputes are resolved without coercion. China’s influence, by contrast, grows when norms are weak, as it relies on bilateral leverage, opaque financing, and extractive relationships of dependency.

Trump has wrongly judged many allies and international institutions as more trouble than they are worth. Future administrations will have to plot a painstaking comeback from ruptured relationships. This must involve not invoking the past but demonstrating that Washington has a forward-looking vision for multilateral institutions that can benefit others.

To reemerge as a credible standard-bearer for the global order, the United States must first follow the rules at home. By reducing volatility and corruption, strengthening rule of law, and making markets predictable, the country can lessen the uncertainty tax that makes building at home slower and more expensive while shrinking space for coercive statecraft abroad.

Globally, Washington should revamp U.S. foreign aid, which Trump has dismantled wholesale, and build up the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., potentially augmenting it with a transparent sovereign wealth fund. The United States will also need to leverage its business, technology, and civil society sectors to identify ways to pay into the international system, earning back a seat at the table that is premised not just on power but on respect.

The United States cannot compete on its own in every sector: It simply is not able to lead in every technology, manufacturing category, and sphere of the global commons. But a resilient ecosystem that pools the comparative strengths of allies can allow Washington and its partners to compete with Beijing both economically and militarily.

As Democrats wrestle with ideological and generational divides, it may be hard to imagine them rallying behind a common goal. But the party needs a blueprint to deliver on affordability, economic growth, and broad-based prosperity—and abundance offers just that.

The idea that U.S. foreign policy should attend to the frustrations of mainstream voters is not new. Trump claims to champion ordinary Americans, even as that is undercut by his indifference to affordability concerns and refusal to confront his tariffs’ harsh consequences for workers and consumers. In 2020, more credibly, Democrats developed a “foreign policy for the middle class,” a platform that helped guide Biden’s worker-centric trade agenda.

Biden-era policy relied on sector-specific protections to bolster industrial production, including tariffs designed to support U.S. workers and businesses. But manufacturing workers comprise only about 8 percent of U.S. employment, making the protected constituency an imperfect proxy for the middle class as a whole. Biden’s trade policy resulted in rising inflation that occluded job and nominal wage growth, undercutting its intended benefits. And due to legal, regulatory, and other hurdles, his administration was unable to quickly fulfill infrastructure promises.

Biden’s agenda was built around a clear logic: U.S. foreign policy should visibly serve working families, especially by insulating those families from the downsides of trade and globalization. An abundance foreign policy points to a wider set of intended beneficiaries—not only workers in exposed industries but anyone squeezed by high prices and scarcity. It would use a different yardstick for success, measured less by whether policies signal support for workers and more by whether the United States hits ambitious targets for increased output in areas such as housing and infrastructure and lowers costs for consumers.

Protecting a future agenda from the same fate as Biden’s will require Washington to more tightly integrate economic, trade, domestic, and foreign policy. The intelligence community must be trained to analyze threats to abundance and competitiveness. This should be complemented by transparent mechanisms for coordination and problem-solving with private sector actors including shippers, manufacturers, logisticians, and tech companies.

An abundance foreign policy will only deliver if it preserves the United States’ defining advantage over China: the expectation, battered but not dead yet, that U.S. power—at least in the hands of most presidents—is exercised with constraints, including respect for international norms. Despite profound global umbrage over Trump, there still remains a residual attraction to the United States. In a European Council on Foreign Relations/University of Oxford survey conducted in November 2025, publics in major “swing” democracies indicated this, with 61 percent of Indians and 51 percent of Brazilians favoring their countries being part of a U.S. rather than Chinese bloc.

An abundance agenda divorced from Washington’s commitments to rights, lawful governance, and accountability will squander that advantage. That is why the U.S. government will need to embed rights protections and rule-of-law safeguards into future trade deals, technology exports, and financing projects. Washington’s allies are spending the Trump years exploring alternatives to U.S. leadership. If they experience a U.S. capacity-building agenda as predation—with extractive resource bargains, opaque contracting, or debilitating debt burdens—they will likely never return to Washington’s orbit.

The U.S. foreign-policy apparatus is reasonably well positioned to embrace a focus on speed, delivery, and measurable benefits. Because they fall under the executive branch, diplomacy and statecraft generally have fewer bureaucratic and legislative hurdles than domestic policy. The Trump administration’s reckless strafing of the U.S. diplomatic corps and federal agencies may even offer a silver lining here: A future administration will have no choice but to reinvent these structures for today’s world, escaping hidebound patterns.