The world sees what is happening, but half of America is looking the other way. We are building more walls than the one keeping people out. We are building a wall of distrust around the entire nation. That means we can no longer hold a leadership position. Trust and reliability are essential.
The US will be unable to put the genie back in the bottle. Trump’s shocking actions have eroded the trust that has underpinned America’s global leadership, and the damage will be evident long after Trump has left the scene. Having once abdicated its moral authority as the anchor of the free world, who is to say it can’t happen again?
This breakdown in trust will cast a long and lasting shadow over economic performance, not least in the US itself, where it is affecting business decision-making, especially the costly long-term commitments associated with hiring and capital spending. Businesses need to scale their future operations relative to confident expectations of future growth trajectories – now an increasingly uncertain proposition. Asset values and consumer confidence, too, have been shaken. Uncertainty, the enemy of decision-making, is likely to freeze the most dynamic segments of the US economy.
STEPHEN S. ROACH
Stephen S. Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (Yale University Press, 2014) and Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale University Press, 2022).
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