Abundance Is a Better Foreign Policy
The world is in chaos and the rules-based order is dead. Let’s build something better.
America is taking out foreign leaders left and right. Afghanistan and Pakistan are at war, too, and Bahrain is facing Shiite riots. The rules-based order has been pronounced dead. And its formerly adherent members have no idea what to do about any of this.
That’s because they no longer have a shared framework. Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accurately declared what every Western leader had avoided saying: the rules-based international order is over, globalization has failed, and economic integration has become “a weapon of coercion.” But his prescription of “variable geometry” coalitions, middle powers coordinating issue-by-issue, is a dodge. It’s saying “we’ll figure things out on a case by case basis, wherever our interests happen to align.”
That’s not enough when a crisis hits, like it did this weekend when strikes on Iran started. And it’s not enough to create a long-term, durable strategy for future prosperity. It’s no wonder everyone was flailing at Munich. The Western allies need a new shared framework, one that recognizes men will never be angels, but steers us in the right direction anyway. A diplomatic and economic structure that relies on incentives rather than idealism.
That framework is abundance.
Abundance is a supply-side reform movement. The idea is simple: democracies have made it too hard to build the things their citizens need, from housing to energy to medicine. Abundance has mostly been framed as a domestic policy, like fixing permitting and reforming planning and state capacity. That’s all great, but supply expansion is and should be inherently international, even though almost nobody is treating it that way.
Imagine if we replaced the old logics of coordination — following an arcane web of international rules and regulations and norms, performing allegiance to a world order — with a new logic of expanding our productive capacities together. What if the democracies of the world aligned our regulations, secured our supply chains, opened our talent pipelines, and got to building? Countries wouldn’t participate out of loyalty or idealism, but because expanding our collective productive capacity makes everyone richer, more resilient, and harder to coerce.
To be clear, abundance cannot and should not be globalization 2.0. The old model optimized for efficiency: remove barriers, let capital flow to the cheapest producer, and tell displaced workers that rising tides lift all boats. It didn’t. Communities that lost manufacturing to offshoring haven’t forgiven us — and specifically the Democratic Party — ever since. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s recent reimposition of 10 percent duties after the Supreme Court struck down his previous tariff regime shows that his nationalist solutions are legally fragile, economically disruptive, and produce no durable architecture. The answer isn’t to retreat behind tariff walls, it’s to build more, with allies whose workers benefit from that expansion.
In practice, an abundant foreign policy means having three goals: recognize, secure, build.
First: the easiest boost to Western economies would be to recognize each other’s work. Right now, allied democracies too often treat each other like strangers in the marketplace. A British medical device company that gets approval from its UK regulator has to start the process from scratch in Washington, Brussels, Ottawa, and Canberra — that’s five separate approval regimes for the same product sold to countries that share intelligence, nuclear strategy, and military command structures. No wonder over 80 percent of the UK health-tech industry reports disruption from regulatory uncertainty. And it’s not just medical devices: allied AI safety frameworks, financial regulations, and professional credentials all suffer from the same dysfunction.
The fix isn’t forcing harmonization — nobody wants to adopt someone else’s rulebook, which is why TTIP and other international trade deals so often struggle. Instead, we should offer mutual recognition: each country keeps its own standards, but agrees that an allied regulator’s approval process is competent enough to pass muster in their own system. If that sounds implausible, consider that the US and EU already do this for pharmaceutical manufacturing inspections. Nobody has to surrender sovereignty — we can just stop wasting time and trust our allies to have basic competency.
Second: we should secure what we need together. The obvious example here is semiconductors: Taiwan produces 92 percent of the advanced semiconductors we need on an island a hundred miles from mainland China. A disruption — an invasion of course, but also a blockade or even an earthquake — would be catastrophic. The collective response to this potential 10 trillion in global economic losses? Everyone is trying to solve it alone. The US passed the CHIPS Act, Japan is subsidizing TSMC fabs in Kumamoto, Europe is courting its own plants. Last month Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted a Critical Minerals Ministerial at the State Department, but the proposal is to have 55 separate conversations with 55 separate nations about the same supply chain problem. Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer flew to Beijing seeking bilateral deals with the very country whose dominance he’d identified as a strategic threat. Canada did the same thing. That’s less thoughtful statecraft, more every man in a suit for himself.
The abundance version looks different: allied countries co-invest in shared mineral processing capacity. That way, Australian lithium doesn’t have to be shipped to China to become a battery; joint purchasing mechanisms give allied buyers collective leverage (instead of letting commodity producers play them against each other); and a distributed semiconductor network allows the United States to provide design and capital, Japan to provide materials, the Netherlands to provide lithography, and fabrication to be spread across trusted partners.
Instead of having five fully redundant national champions, we can have a supply chain where every link is in allied hands and no single point of failure can bring the whole thing down. This is how allied defense procurement already works: the F-35 has 1,900 suppliers in nine countries, and as a result every one of those countries has more aerospace jobs than if they’d tried to build a fifth-generation fighter alone
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Third: build to complement each other. Securing supply chains protects what exists, but abundance also means creating productive capacity that no allied country could build alone. The math on AI makes the case: according to the Federal Reserve, the United States controls 74 percent of global high-end AI compute. China holds 14 percent. The EU has less than five. US hyperscalers are spending over $400 billion annually on AI infrastructure, more than five times China’s investment. No allied country can match that individually. But a coordinated approach — frontier training in the United States, inference infrastructure in Europe, applied AI and safety architecture in the UK — would give the democratic world a shared foundation that none of them could afford to build from scratch.
The same logic applies to clean energy, to biotech, to advanced manufacturing: the country that can’t build will have nothing to compete with, and no allied country can build everything it needs by itself. China understood this intuitively; whatever you think of it, the Belt and Road Initiative was a foreign policy organized around productive capacity. The democratic world needs its own version — not state-directed mercantilism, but coordinated expansion where each country builds what it’s best at and the whole is actually greater than the parts.
Recognize, secure, build represent solutions to three frictions that make every allied economy individually weaker and more exposed. Remove them, and you have a productive base that’s resilient by design — not because everyone agreed to follow the same rules, but because everyone’s material interest is served by building together.
I can predict some objections. One side will say this is naive, that great-power competition is about hard power, not growth coalitions. The other will point out that this does nothing to protect human rights or prevent war. How does abundance prevent the United States from toppling foreign leaders or Russia from further invading Europe? How does any of this end the forever wars?
An abundance framework doesn’t need angels — it needs engineers, scientists, trading partners, and allied governments that understand the basic math of the 21st century: you cannot coerce what you cannot outproduce.
Both objections miss the point. Abundance isn’t meant to replace our rules for peace and the conduct of war, it’s meant to give us a reason to enforce them again. When your economy depends on Chinese processing and Russian energy, you’re going to struggle to sanction either seriously, no matter what the UN Charter says. Europe proved this: it took a land war on the continent to break the dependency on Russian gas, and even then it was agonizing. An abundance framework changes that calculus. If your productive capacity runs through allied supply chains — if your batteries, your chips, your AI infrastructure all depend on allied coordination — then maintaining those relationships is preservation, not just idealism. Rules enforced by shame are optional. Rules backed by mutual economic dependence are not.
As for hard power: there is no hard power without productive capacity, and the democratic world is running short. Again, the Ukraine war proved this. The United States and Europe wanted to arm Ukraine and discovered they couldn’t manufacture enough artillery shells to keep pace. Political will didn’t fail, but production did. We won World War II in part because the Arsenal of Democracy would outproduce the Axis. Today’s democratic world has let that industrial base atrophy. Abundance is how you rebuild it, not within one country’s borders, but across an allied network that can actually sustain the demands of both peacetime prosperity and wartime mobilization.
This weekend, as the news broke about Iran, no allied capital had a coordinated response, economic or otherwise. Europe pushed off even meeting to discuss it until Monday. There was no shared supply architecture to leverage, no joint productive capacity to threaten to withhold. Instead we had 30 separate governments scrambling to figure out what they think. That’s what the absence of a shared framework looks like. And it doesn’t make any of us safer or stronger.
Men will never be angels. But an abundance framework doesn’t need angels — it needs engineers, scientists, trading partners, and allied governments that understand the basic math of the 21st century: you cannot coerce what you cannot outproduce.
Build together or decline alone. Those are the options. Everything else is a Davos speech.
