The past year marked a turning point for the global economy. Economic tensions were amplified. Trade relationships were reassessed. Geopolitical alignments shifted. And the United States fast-tracked efforts to rebuild domestic manufacturing and protect critical supply chains.

While the upheaval of 2025 exposed deep flaws in the free-trade, global economic system of the past three decades, it also created tremendous opportunities to rethink and reenvision our collective economic future. 

As we begin 2026, let’s commit to three innovations for a more resilient, fair, open, and secure economic order.

For years, market economies—like the United States’—tolerated non-market competition that steadily undermined domestic industrial bases. State-driven economies—like China’s—used access to overseas consumer markets to overproduce, dump heavily subsidized goods at artificially low prices, and build imposing global monopolies. The result was hollowed-out American industries, suppressed prices and wages, and fragile supply chains.

Pushing back against China’s non-market manipulations has required strong medicine, from tariffs and trade barriers to export controls and forced labor restrictions. These forceful steps have begun to disrupt an unsustainable status quo.

Permanent trade warfare is not an acceptable outcome. Having established leverage and reset expectations, it is time to reimagine the international trading system that comes next.  

The United States should lead a transition towards what might be called a “

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