Lynn offers a fresh vision for how to build a new, liberal international system that strengthens democracies, limits China’s power, and fixes supply chain fragility

WASHINGTON – Open Markets Institute executive director Barry Lynn published a feature article in Foreign Affairs that details how the United States can use traditional antimonopoly principles to establish a simple quota system designed to “shock proof” international systems, strengthen democracy, and rebuild a liberal world order. 

In the article, Lynn updates and expands Joseph Nye’s well-known concept of “soft power.” Along the way he provides a radically fresh telling of the history of U.S. trade policy, and details how the United States has always used anti-monopoly tools to help it achieve its strategic goals. 

Below are excerpts from Lynn’s piece: 

More than 75 years after the United States began to build a system of liberal trade to help integrate the world around a vision of peaceful economic cooperation, many of the most vital international systems are failing. Nations are fighting over how to secure vaccines, how to divvy up the production of semiconductors, how to respond to China’s mercantilism and militarism, how to manage technology and information monopolists such as Facebook and Google, and even how to share the metals necessary to build the batteries for electric cars. 

These clashes and government officials’ responses to them threaten far more than fragile international industrial and financial systems. They have led states to lose faith in the rule of law and in the intentions of longtime allies. Worse, they have played a role in the disruption of democratic debates and norms in the United States and Europe.

Applied to today’s conditions, this lesson would instruct the United States to ensure that no other country controls more than… a quarter of the manufacturing capacity that supplies U.S. demand for any essential good, component, or service. Once any state fulfills 25 percent of total U.S. demand, Washington would require top-tier manufacturers and importers to turn to suppliers located elsewhere.

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