Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We'll get some views now from Oren Cass, founder and chief economist of the think tank American Compass. He's also a New York Times and Financial Times contributing opinion writer and has an article in the November December issue of Foreign Affairs called A Grand Strategy of Reciprocity: How to Build an Economic and Security Order That Works for America. It's a big think critique of US economic and national security policy since the end of the Cold War that includes some praise and some criticism of the Trump administration so far on both the economy and the US's place in the world.

It also looks to me very relevant to the official new national security strategy that the Trump administration released on Thursday, and that's been making news both in this country and around the world. We'll get to that link. Oren, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Oren Cass: Thanks. It's great to be with you again.

Brian Lehrer: Your essay begins with a comparison of how the United States approached the world after victory in World War II versus after victory in the Cold War. You say one approach worked, one did not. Would you start by explaining a little of that big sweep of history framing?

Oren Cass: Sure. I think it's important to recognize that any nation, but certainly one in a leadership position like the United States has to have what's called a grand strategy, meaning how we understand our place in the world, what our interests are around the world, how we're going to relate to allies, and what that's going to mean in both economic and national security terms. I think everyone's very familiar with the Cold War era policy that was typically called containment, which was the idea that there was a Cold War. It was important to recognize that.

The United States was going to support other democratic allies, other market economies, in attempting to contain the Soviet Union and prevent the spread of communism. I think we would say certainly that brought a lot of costs for the United States, for the American people as well, but the benefits vastly outweighed the costs, and ultimately it was successful. It led to victory in the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the unquestioned global hegemon. The question then was what to do next.

In the early 1990s, there was actually a very robust debate: should the United States, now that the World Wars, now that the Cold War was over, go back to a more humble posture as a republic protected by two oceans, or should it attempt to lead the world and maintain that hegemony? Ultimately, that's the view that won out. The term that was used a lot was benevolent hegemony. The idea was that we should incur a lot of costs to be the world leader. We should absorb the trade policies that might be unfair elsewhere. We should essentially pay to defend a lot of the world, and we would accrue a lot of benefits for it.

I think a dispassionate analysis of that would be that it did not work at all. That, especially over the last 25 years, the costs of that have gone up and up and up. The benefits of that have been vanishingly small. I think the American people rightly have said, first of all, enough of that, but also that that's over, that the US is no longer in a position to be that kind of country. So we have to figure out what to do next.

Brian Lehrer: On what the US was aiming for after the Cold War, one phrase you quote is benign hegemony from the conservative or neoconservative thinkers William Kristol and Robert Kagan, published decades ago, also in Foreign Affairs magazine, where your essay appears. Benign hegemony. Hegemony because the US was the only remaining superpower, and benign because they saw the US as using that influence to spread both political and economic freedom around the world, which in theory would help Americans and everyone else, too. You do write that by some measures, the strategy worked. Take us one level deeper into what worked and what didn't, in your opinion.

Oren Cass: I think you could say, at least in the 1990s, that it worked. If you run through what was happening in the 1990s, all the way from the Persian Gulf War up through the transformations, whether it was the Oslo accords in the Middle East, South Africa transitioning from apartheid, NATO intervening successfully in the Balkans. This is when we signed NAFTA, we formed the World Trade Organization. The EU adopts the euro. I think rightly seemed the famous phrase is the end of history. Everybody was moving toward liberal democracy. Of course, the United States presumably would benefit from that. Anything it could do to move people along in that direction was going to be a good thing.

I think you probably see a really important inflection point at the turn of the century, at the turn of the millennium, where this is when we decide, I think, at the peak of hubris, we're going to embrace China and bring it into the World Trade Organization and somehow by virtue of trading with China, that was going to transform it into a liberal democracy over time. The idea was that we were going to export our values, and there was no way any country could resist that.

Oren Cass: And I think what we got instead in the foreign policy, then after 9/11, this is when we get these projects of not just regime change, but nation-building. The premise was that, look, we're going to have potentially massive trade imbalances as countries like China become the factory to the world. We're going to incur massive defense burdens as we go around trying to build other nations. If that allows us to preserve this liberal democratic order around the world, we will ultimately be the chief beneficiary. What happened instead was the cost just kept going up.

Obviously, the cost of the forever wars was in the trillions of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of lives, if you think about serious injuries and mental effects and so forth of those we had serving in uniform, the deindustrialization of our heartland, the loss of millions of jobs, and then ultimately the rise of China. I think it's really important, as you look in the 2020s, to recognize that not only had it not been working well, but that it's not so much a normative question of what we want to be having in the world. It's a descriptive question. We are no longer a hegemon. We do have a peer adversary in China.

If we continue trying to behave the way we have been, it's not just that we're going to get taken advantage of, but it's that we're really going to lose a lot of the things that I think matter most to us as a nation.

Brian Lehrer: I want to ask where you think or you might think right and left overlap on this. You consider yourself a conservative, a new conservative, you call it in the title of your book, The New Conservatives, the book you edited of writings from your think tank, American Compass. Much of the criticism of US globalization after the Cold War came from the left. We might think of the big protest in Seattle in 1999 against the World Trade Organization conference, for example, based on what the protesters saw as exploitation of workers and consumers and the environment by an agreement that favored not just China, but global capitalists.

How much does the conservative critique of globalization, which you've been articulating and which helped fuel the rise of Trumpism, I think it's fair to say. How much does that overlap with the more left-leaning critique, as you see it?

Oren Cass: It's a great question. I think I would say there were probably two left-leaning critiques of globalization. If you go back to the '90s, the Seattle WTO protest thread was really more focused on concern about what the United States was purportedly doing to the rest of the world. That is, that it was going to be exploiting the developing world, that it was bad for workers in the developing world.

Frankly, I'm not sure how well that has played out. I would say that in a lot of ways, certainly in China, it turned out that access to global markets was crucial to the growth and development of those countries and the reduction of global poverty. The other thread, though, that you saw on the left, was more the labor left, and this was even going all the way back to NAFTA. You absolutely had labor leaders on the left who were saying, "Wait a minute, asking American workers to compete with easily exploited foreign workers is a race to the bottom."

If you're saying that the only thing that matters is the cheapest possible product, regardless of how workers are treated, regardless of what they're paid, regardless of how you treat the environment, you're asking something impossible of American workers. They're going to be the losers in this. I think that has borne out a lot more. I think that is something that shares a lot in common with what you now hear folks on the right of center increasingly concerned about, which is a recognition that, look, just the cheapest possible stuff, whatever is best for corporate profits, those are not necessarily what's best for America. That's not necessarily what's best for American workers and families, and communities.

A more holistic view of what we want from the economy and what we want from markets, and what it would take for trade to work well, would recognize that the model of globalization we pursued has really failed in those respects.

Brian Lehrer: I want to bring in the news hook here. I had read your essay on reciprocity when it first came out a number of weeks ago. That's why we booked you to come on the show. I thought of it again just the other day after the Trump administration released its new national security strategy last week, described by Politico, for example, as a formal explanation of the Trump administration's worldview. Much more focus on the Western Hemisphere, including border security, and not letting China get too much of a foothold in Latin America in particular. It's being described as having a more transactional relationship with Europe, reciprocity as opposed to one based on values.

How much are they doing in practice, what your essay was preaching in print?

Oren Cass: I think the Trump administration is moving in the right direction on a lot of these points. As you said, I think the national security strategy reflects some of that. I think the most important thing that the Trump administration has done, that the president himself has been very clear on, that I think Secretary Rubio has been very clear on, is just declaring that the old model is over. There are so many questions about what does America First actually mean in practice? I think there are some people who would say, "That's an isolationist assertion that America is only going to look internally to its domestic concerns."

I don't think that's, that's right at all. I think it's best to understand America first as a refutation of what you were describing earlier in our conversation. That idea of benevolent hegemony, that somehow if the US actually focuses on serving others, that will somehow come back around and redound to our benefit. I think America First, and where you see the administration focus is saying that's not actually true. You actually have to be able to define what the American interest is and how engagement with the rest of the world is actually going to advance that.

If that's talking in terms of security policy and defense policy, the US is fortunate to itself be quite secure. In engaging with allies, I think the US certainly benefits from being part of an alliance and working with other countries. I think one thing you saw in the strategy was this idea of burden sharing or burden shifting, which recognizes that ultimately, certainly, the United States should expect other countries to be the lead defenders of themselves in their own regions. Frankly, it's better for those countries to be the lead defenders of themselves in their regions, whereas the US is going to, relatively speaking, focus more on interests close to home.

Then you see the same thing on trade policy. The United States absolutely wants to have trade if it is balanced, if it actually benefits both sides, but it is no longer going to be interested in a model where the trade clearly does not benefit the United States, where the United States is running massive deficits, losing its industry. We're not going to accept that on the basis that somehow that's just good for promoting global markets, and we trust that in the long run, if it's good for global markets, it will end up being good for us as well.

Brian Lehrer: I know you're largely pro tariffs, but you're not 100% pro Trump from how I read you. For example, you wrote in the Foreign Affairs essay that even though you think tariffs can be good in the long run for American workers, that Trump's trade agenda has been haphazard, needlessly antagonizing allies, heightening uncertainty, and with oscillating unpredictability on China. Your words. Would you take us into some of that?

Oren Cass: I think it goes back to what I was saying a few minutes ago, that what I think the administration deserves a lot of credit for, what President Trump deserves a lot of credit for, is being willing to say the old deal is over and we are going to disrupt that. Sometimes you have to shake your friends pretty hard to convince them to wake up and that things really are changing. You also do have to have a clear vision and description of where you're going, what you want the new arrangement to be. I think that's important for purposes of healthy alliances and trade relationships.

It's also really important for business investment because, at the end of the day, if the goal is to bring back a lot of manufacturing to the United States, to get a lot more investment in making things here, businesses have to have confidence that that is actually going to be the long-term goal. They have to know not just what are the tariffs today versus tomorrow, but three years from now, five years from now, what is the picture supposed to be. That's where I think the administration could do a much better job of actually articulating, "Here is where we want to go."

Not just one-on-one agreements with lots of countries that potentially change frequently, but rather-- and this is the idea behind a grand strategy of reciprocity, we want to build an alliance among countries that can actually treat each other as equals. That can all take responsibility for security in their regions. That can all engage in balanced trade with each other, rather than what's called a beggar-thy-neighbor strategy of trying to benefit at the other's expense. That can all ultimately hold hands on the China issue and say, "We are all going to agree that we need to keep China out. We're not going to try to do our own deal with China that benefits ourselves, while hoping that everybody else takes a tougher line."

I think that could be a very attractive alliance for all the participants. I think it would be a lot better for the United States, but getting from here to there requires really articulating very clearly, "Here's where we're trying to go and why," and then building toward that future.

Brian Lehrer: A couple of interesting texts coming in from listeners. One asks, "What about the argument that having economic tie-ins with China imports, exports, and even treasury bills owned by China is of mutual benefit and suppressed the likelihood of armed conflict?" What would you say to that listener?

Oren Cass: I think there are two points there. One is the question of is it mutual benefit in the actual nature of the relationship? I think, to me anyway, the clearance is that it's not. That an actual balanced trading relationship, the kind you learn about in economics class, where there's some things we can make relatively more efficiently, there are some things they can make relatively more efficiently. Let's trade. That's fantastic. We should be seeking out those relationships anywhere we can find them.

The problem with that relationship that the listener described, where when we say China is holding our treasury bonds, what's actually going on, and you see this in the trade deficit that emerges, is lots of stuff that we used to make here gets offshored, and China makes it instead. We lose the jobs, we lose the capacity, we lose the learning, and the technological leadership. Then they don't send that to us in return for something else that we make. Instead, they send that to us in return for treasury bonds, which are literally pieces of paper saying, "We owe you. Someone else over here will pay you for it eventually."

We are literally both hollowing out our capacity today and running up the credit card in return for the cheap stuff. That can feel good in the short run, right? Who doesn't like cheap stuff that you didn't even have to do anything for? It is not a mutually beneficial exchange in the long run. Then I would just really challenge the idea that, actually, much closer trading relationships are the key to somehow preventing war. I don't think we actually have a lot of evidence for that. I think actually over the past century, we have a couple of world wars that broke out among countries that were very closely intertwined in various ways.

Then we had a very long cold war that never turned hot between two countries that had decided to concede each other their spheres of influence and really hold each other at arm's length.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener texts, "It seems like America First is proving to mean self-enrichment for a chosen few and the Trump family. That's partly why the 'doctrine' is so enigmatic." Oren, I think you've critiqued some of that, including what Trump is trying to do with cryptocurrency. What would you say to that listener?

Oren Cass: I completely agree with a lot of the criticism of particular transactions that we've seen somewhat in the Trump administration, more so surrounding figures in the Trump administration that raise a lot of very clear conflicts of interest. I certainly don't think it's good. I don't think it's defensible. I don't think it benefits the country. I do think it's important to say that you can, of course, have that kind of behavior and conflict of interest and so forth under any grand strategy. I don't think there's any question that in the era of globalization--

Certainly, in the building of closer ties with China, you saw an awful lot of American business leaders, frankly, a bunch of quite prominent political figures and their families pursuing a lot of very bad transactions that were not in the national interest. Conversely, you can certainly be pursuing a more America First reciprocity type strategy that is in the national interest. I would just say I think it's very important to separate these two questions. You can have good leadership or bad leadership, and you can have different grand strategies. Obviously, the ideal is, we need to find a way to get both right.

Brian Lehrer: One more. A listener writes, "Manufacturing jobs are constricting currently as a result of this America First thing." That, of course, is in contrast to what the tariffs regime is supposed to do. Make it more competitive to rebuild industrial capacity in this country, even though the wages are going to be higher than in China or Bangladesh, or Mexico, wherever.

Oren Cass: I think at this point, manufacturing jobs is not a realistic measure to look at. If you think about what it would look like to really achieve reindustrialization, you have to actually implement the policies, including the tariffs. Businesses have to decide they're going to take it seriously and develop a new strategy. Then they actually have to invest to build stuff here in the United States. Then, after you've actually built new capacity, you hire people to work in the factories you've built.

Anybody who's saying four months after we impose tariffs, why haven't manufacturing jobs gone up? You can pretty much write off as not making a good-faith argument. I think what you have to look at in the short run is measures like investment. Are we seeing high levels of capital expenditure initially, commitments, and then the actual spending start to happen on building domestic capacity? My read of the data is that right now we are. Capital expenditures in industrial equipment, and so far, are much higher than they had been historically. I think you're seeing a lot of very genuine commitments in industries, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, steel, autos, in expanding domestic capacity.

Then one more thing that I think is really encouraging is you're starting to see the financial sector focus on this a lot more. JP Morgan just announced a $1.5 trillion commitment to rebuilding in the US over 10 years, including taking direct investment stakes itself, which frankly, investment banks don't actually do very much anymore. You're seeing a lot of big financial players start to take that more seriously. That's the first step. If you see that stuff happening, we're on the right track. If a couple years from now, factories are actually coming online, then we're on the right track. Hiring people is not step one.

Brian Lehrer: We just have a minute left, and there are so many other things we could talk about and spur us from the conversation we've been having, but let me end this way. One place where your new conservatism, as you call it, may divert from the older versions is support for unions. Am I saying that right?

Oren Cass: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Because?

Oren Cass: This goes back to the point you raised about where is there overlap with views that might have historically been more on the left. The concern about worker interests and good outcomes for workers is now very much-- I think it's certainly at the heart of the new conservatism. I think you see more and more, even the Republican Party taking it seriously, looking at legislation that would actually be more supportive of unions, engaging with unions like the Teamsters, like the building trades unions. Frankly, I think we also have a lot of problems with unions in this country.

The answer isn't to just be blindly pro-union, but I think a much more balanced view of worker interests and not just corporate interests is incredibly important to doing good economic policy, and is something you are starting to see and will continue to see more of on the right of center.

Brian Lehrer: Oren Cass, founder and chief economist of the think tank American Compass. He's also a New York Times in Financial Times contributing opinion writer and has an article in the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs called A Grand Strategy of Reciprocity: How to Build an Economic and Security Order That Works for America. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Oren Cass: Always great to be with you. Thank you.

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.