How to lose the 21st century, in three easy steps
Trump is throwing away what could have been the next great American century.
More than anything else, President Donald Trump loves winning. Yet he has already positioned America to lose the 21st century, in three simple steps:
- Alienate your friends.
- Destroy your business environment.
- Slaughter your golden goose (i.e., science and research).
Trump most vividly demonstrated Step 1 with his Oval Office tantrum against a war-torn ally. But it also includes his gratuitous insults of our friends; abrupt termination of programs tackling global public health menaces (including some that the United States caused); and threats to punish our closest trading partners, with no clear objective.
All that soft power the United States accumulated over the past century is vaporizing. This means no friends to support us against our adversaries, whether rogue nations or terrorist groups. Ticking off our allies also means ticking off some of our best customers, who will turn to economic competitors. In some cases, these customers are outright boycotting U.S. products.
Which brings me to Step 2: our business advantage.
Investors have long viewed the United States as more attractive than other powerful or growing economies (such as, say, China), given our free capital markets, strong property rights, (relatively) predictable regulatory landscape and — most importantly — rule of law. Businesses can be confident, for example, that the state will not expropriate their assets without due process. They can trust that if they enter into a legally binding contract to buy some good or service, their counterparty will deliver — and if not, they will have legal recourse, regardless of the other side’s political connections.
Under the Trump administration, however, none of these business conditions can be taken for granted.
As Trump announces regulatory changes or funding cuts, those harmed have deployed their political connections to beg for exemptions. Capital is increasingly allocated based not on its best use but on what will most appease the White House (or enrich its occupant).
Businesses are finding it impossible to write contracts because prices and rules fluctuate with the trade whims of the president. Manufacturers report that tariff uncertainty has already caused spot commodity prices to rise about 20 percent. It is no wonder, then, that business investment and new orders have stalled or outright declined.
Then there’s the more critical question of what America and its businesses invest in.
Our country’s greatest global advantage, by far, is in science, research and technology. We have long been the global leader in R&D, which is why we have the most innovative companies, the most successful tech sector and the mightiest military. It is this knowledge sector — not some imagined renaissance in low-value goods manufacturing — that will determine who “wins” the 21st century.
We have faced great competition in this domain recently. The Chinese government has surged investment into all kinds of new R&D, from medical innovation to drone capabilities to better and cheaper electric vehicles. In January, a Chinese firm’s breakthrough on artificial intelligence led to warnings of another “Sputnik moment,” a reference to a pivotal turn in the U.S.-Soviet space race.
Despite all this, Trump is gutting our scientific and research infrastructure.
The world-renowned National Institutes of Health is pushing out senior scientists and ending scientific training programs, such as its elite postbaccalaureate program for STEM students. Elsewhere Trump has purged experts from the National Science Foundation and agencies studying weather, agriculture and education.
Meanwhile, Trump’s immigration policies will cut off our international talent pipeline, which has been America’s not-so-secret weapon in building a dominant knowledge sector. In fact, Trump has prohibited some government-employed U.S. researchers from even coauthoring research with international scholars, such as those at the World Health Organization.
“If these types of policies continue, the U.S. will lose its role as a leader in science,” said Petra Moser, an economic historian who has studied scientific collaboration and how prior immigration restrictions reduced the productivity of American-born scientists. “Science overall will lose — the U.S. more so than the rest of the world, because people will stop coming here and go elsewhere.”
Indeed, some other countries are licking their chops at the talent Trump is driving away.
Meanwhile, Trump has attempted to hack billions of dollars in federal grants from private research institutions. Despite lawsuits ordering the government to resume halted NIH funding, federal dollars still aren’t going out because the Trump administration has stopped the routine meetings required by law to take place before agencies can select and fund new research projects.
Some research institutions, uncertain about their future grants and fearful of possible punitive taxes on their endowments, have stopped training new scientists. Among the universities that have paused or cut back grad school admissions in STEM fields are the University of Washington, Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Southern California and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.