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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared Tuesday that America's decades-long wager on economic globalization had failed, casting the Trump administration's tariffs and reshoring push not as a transient political stance but as part of a fundamental rethinking of how trade shapes national power.
Speaking to the Economic Club of New York, Bessent argued that the country had accepted cheaper goods at the cost of dangerous foreign dependencies.
For investors positioned around a return to pre-pandemic trade norms, the message was pointed: that playbook may no longer exist.
Sovereignty Over Supply Chains Bessent told the Economic Club that policymakers had wrongly assumed "low prices would compensate for lost capacity" — a direct rejection of the efficiency-first logic that underpinned the post-Cold War trade order.
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