The United States provides unconditional military support to partners whose conduct undermines American values, while simultaneously refusing substantive cooperation with the world's second-largest economy on threats that affect every American household. Both postures are failures of strategy, not expressions of strength. The first costs taxpayers billions while damaging the moral authority American foreign policy is supposed to project. The second drives up prices on the goods American families buy and forecloses cooperation on the threats (pandemics, climate, AI safety, nuclear stability) that no single country can solve alone. A country that builds again builds foreign relationships based on what they deliver (for American security, American values, and American families), not on what they delivered forty years ago. The five proposals here are the architecture of that doctrine: invest in the diplomatic capacity to actually do foreign policy; build supply chains and trade relationships that work for American workers; spend the world's largest defense budget on the threats the country actually faces; treat global development as the prevention investment it is, not the charity it is framed as; and end the unconditional relationships in either direction that turn American interests into someone else's leverage.
STATE :: AMERICA IN THE WORLD
The five proposals here work as a single argument about how a serious country
actually conducts foreign policy. Diplomacy needs to be staffed. Supply chains
need to be built. Defense spending needs to match the threats the country
actually faces. Global development needs to be evaluated as the prevention
investment it is. And relationships (with allies and adversaries alike)
need to be judged on what they deliver right now, for the security, the
values, and the kitchen-table economics of the Americans paying for them.
These proposals would begin no earlier than January 2029, after the
next presidential term starts. Each depends on the laws, funding,
and preparation it requires.
01▸Alliance Reinvestment & Diplomatic Capacity
Mechanism: America is stronger when we have real allies who trust us. Right now, many of them aren't sure they can count on us. The State Department, the part of government that actually does diplomacy, has been hollowed out. Ambassador jobs sit empty for years. Career diplomats with decades of knowledge leave and are not replaced. When a crisis hits, the only tools left are military ones, because the diplomatic ones aren't staffed.
Three fixes. Restaff: fill the empty embassy jobs and keep the experts we have. Retrain: recruit for languages, regional depth, and modern skills like cyber and supply chains that the old training never covered. And maintain alliances like infrastructure: NATO and our Pacific partnerships get scheduled upkeep and long-term plans, the way Framework treats bridges, because deferred maintenance compounds the same way.
Strong alliances split the bills. Allies who trust us share defense costs, intelligence, disaster response, and the trade rules that keep prices stable. When alliances rot, America pays alone, and that lands on taxpayers and shoppers. An empty embassy negotiates nothing. Diplomacy by default sounds cheap. It leaves every bill on you.
02▸Economic Security & Fair Trade
Mechanism: The things your life depends on, medicine, chips, energy, don't all come from countries that could cut us off tomorrow. The pandemic taught the lesson. We needed masks and couldn't make them. New cars sat in lots waiting for chips. Medicine prices spiked because the ingredients come from two or three places overseas. None of that was bad luck. It was the predictable result of sourcing essentials from single points of failure.
Three parts. A federal watchdog that maps the goods we cannot lose, medicines, chips, energy parts, critical minerals, and gets each one backup sources: made here where that makes sense, made in allied countries where it doesn't. Real incentives, tax credits and loan backing, so the backup factories exist before we need them. The chips law tested the model, and even as Washington fights over its terms, the fabs are rising: public money pulled in many times its size in private investment. And trade deals where labor and environment rules actually bind, so selling into the American market means competing on quality, not on who can pay workers least.
The scope is deliberately narrow. The extra cost of safe sourcing is for the goods we cannot afford to lose, not for everyday shopping. Proposal 5 handles the trade barriers that never had a strategy. Two decades of racing against dollar-an- hour labor hollowed out American wages. Ending that race is industrial policy, foreign policy, and your grocery bill in one move.
Mechanism: Your tax dollars buy a military that's ready for the threats we actually face, not the ones your grandfather faced. America spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined, and the budget just crossed roughly $1 trillion a year after Congress added about $150 billion in 2025 with no strategy test attached. Much of it is still built for the last century: legacy weapons, chronic cost overruns, forces designed to refight the massed land wars of the past. The real fights now are drones, cyber, and precision. Ukraine is the proof. Drones cheaper than a used car are destroying platforms that cost millions.
The fix is a test, not a number. Every program justifies itself against today's threats, or its money moves. A strategic review points spending at what can actually reach American families: cyber attacks on the grid, contested space and sea lanes, AI- driven warfare, fragile supply chains. Old programs that survive on home-district politics retire. Savings go first to modern tools that pass the test. The rest goes to the other security investments on this platform: pandemic readiness, diplomacy, infrastructure. Preventing a major pandemic can bring huge health and economic gains, though those gains are not budget savings.
Alongside the money test, a rules test. Real congressional votes before military action. Sunset clauses on deployments. Public reporting of cost and objective for every commitment. Open-ended wars on autopilot end.
The Pentagon is the largest budget Congress votes on, and it has never passed a full audit. Defending that is not strength.
Mechanism: We spend a fraction of a penny on the dollar to prevent the disasters that cost trillions when they arrive, like the pandemic that closed your kid's school and killed Main Street businesses. Most people think foreign aid is charity. The real program is insurance. In 2020, researchers projected about $16 trillion in lost output and health losses from COVID. That was a forecast of social costs, not a Treasury bill. The overseas warning systems that could catch the next one early cost a few billion.
Three priorities. Pandemic radar: labs, surveillance, and response teams in the places new diseases start, so the next one is caught before it boards a plane. Climate help in the regions whose troubles reach us directly, Central America, the Sahel, South Asia, because instability there becomes border pressure, food prices, and wars we get pulled into. And basic health systems in fragile countries, because stopping an outbreak there costs a fraction of fighting it here.
Every program gets judged on what it prevents, not what it announces. The record earns some trust: the AIDS relief program is credited with saving over twenty million lives for a rounding-error price. Some aid has been wasted, and honest accounting is the fix, not zero.
For scale, all of American diplomacy and aid together has cost well under one percent of the federal budget. One pandemic that grows unwatched costs more than fifty years of it. Insurance is what you buy before you need it. We have been under-buying.
05▸Interest-Based Global Engagement: End Unconditional Relationships
Mechanism: Your tax dollars don't go to countries that use them to violate human rights. Your grocery bill isn't padded by tariffs that outlived their strategy. American foreign policy runs on two bad habits. Some partners get billions in aid and full backing no matter what they do with it. Other countries get frozen out entirely, even on threats that cross every border. Both habits are lazy, and both send you the bill.
Three fixes. One standard for security aid: military help gets tied to independently checked human-rights conduct, with automatic reviews and real consequences, suspension, reduction, redirection, applied to every partner, every year. This uniform review is a proposed change. Existing laws restrict some aid, but their scope and waivers differ. Washington has withheld some aid and waived conditions in other years. One standard is not abandoning allies. It is what makes American backing worth earning.
Second, deal with rivals on the threats that ignore rivalry: pandemics, climate, nuclear weapons, AI safety. Compete hard on everything else, intellectual property, territory, cyber attacks. Talking where it serves us is not weakness. Refusing to talk just means fewer options.
Third, a public scorecard: every major relationship reported to Congress yearly, what it delivers for American security, jobs, and values. This is the other half of Proposal 2's bargain: pay extra to secure the goods we can't lose, and stop paying extra out of habit on everything else. Securing medicine and chips is strategy. A tariff wall applied to everything by reflex is not strategy either. Strategy is a scalpel, not a habit. Relationships deliver, or they get renegotiated.
STATUS :: DRUG SUPPLY CONCENTRATION▸ The United States now holds about 3 percent of global active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing capacity, down from 23 percent in the early 1980s, and only 8 percent of API Drug Master Files, while China in 2024 surpassed India to lead all countries in new annual API filings. One-third of generic APIs sourced by US manufacturers come from sole suppliers, many of them concentrated in a single country, creating single-point-of-failure risk for medicines American families depend on every day.
◇ US Pharmacopeia, "Global manufacturing capacity for active pharmaceutical ingredients remains concentrated," Quality Matters, January 8, 2026 ↗
STATUS :: DEFENSE COST OVERRUNS▸ The Department of Defense plans to invest nearly $2.4 trillion to develop and acquire its 106 costliest weapon programs. In the most recent annual assessment, combined cost estimates for 30 Major Defense Acquisition Programs increased by $49.3 billion in a single year. One program, the Air Force's Sentinel missile system, accounted for $36 billion of that increase alone. The average major weapon system now takes almost 12 years to deliver initial capability, a timeline that grew by a year and a half in a single year, running years past original planned delivery dates.
◇ US Government Accountability Office, "Weapon Systems Annual Assessment: DOD Leaders Should Ensure That Newer Programs Are Structured for Speed and Innovation," GAO-25-107569, June 2025 ↗
STATUS :: ARMS ACCOUNTABILITY GAP▸ The United States accounted for 43 percent of all global arms exports in 2020–24 (more than four times the share of the next-largest supplier), with Saudi Arabia as the single largest recipient of US arms at 12 percent of all US exports, 74 percent of Saudi Arabia's total arms imports. SIPRI measures transfers, not compliance with US law. Leahy laws restrict aid to abusive security units; Section 502B also limits security aid over human rights. Our criticism is uneven application and the lack of the uniform independent review proposed here, not the absence of binding rules.
◇ Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2024," SIPRI Fact Sheet, March 2025 (authors: George, Djokic, Hussain, Wezeman, Wezeman) ↗
STATUS :: DIPLOMATIC PARITY LOST▸ Since 2019, China has operated more diplomatic posts than the United States. That is the first time in modern history America hasn't led. The gap peaked at 8 posts in 2021 and narrowed to 3 by 2023, but the trend hasn't reversed. The hollowing-out of US diplomatic capacity and the sustained expansion of competitor capacity meet at exactly the wrong moment for both alliance maintenance and strategic engagement.
◇ Lowy Institute, "Global Diplomacy Index 2024: Launch," The Interpreter, 2024 (Bonnie Bley et al.) ↗
METHODOLOGY :: DIPLOMATICPOSTSCHART
▸ HOW THE CHART IS BUILT
Each marker is a country's total diplomatic post count at a
specific Lowy Institute Global Diplomacy Index edition. A
"diplomatic post" in Lowy's methodology includes bilateral
embassies, high commissions, consulates-general, consulates,
and permanent missions to international organizations (the UN
in New York, the WTO in Geneva, etc.). It does not include
domestic ministry staff, special-envoy offices without a
physical overseas post, or liaison offices below consulate
status. The five data points cover the 2016 inaugural edition,
the 2017 update, and the 2019, 2021, and 2024 editions.
A note on the final data point:
The Lowy 2024 Index was published in February 2024, but the
underlying data was collected between July and November 2023.
The chart x-axis labels that point 2023 (the data-collection
year) rather than 2024 (the publication year). Putting 2024 on
the axis for 2023 data would misrepresent when the measurement
happened.
A note on sparse data:
The Lowy Index is not published annually — there is no 2018,
2020, 2022, or 2023 standalone edition. The lines connecting
markers are straight segments between confirmed measurement
years, not interpolated annual figures. Smooth curves would
imply yearly measurement that didn't happen.
The 2019 crossover annotation is the chart's headline:
China surpassed the US in 2019 (China 276, US 273), the first
time in modern history America didn't lead. The gap widened to
+8 by 2021 (likely reflecting US post closures during the COVID
period) then narrowed to +3 by 2023 as the US re-opened posts.
China has held the lead in every Lowy edition since 2019.