Miran, who previously worked on Wall Street, has a Harvard University economics PhD and served 10 months of the first Trump presidency in the U.S. treasury department as a senior advisor. He was nominated shortly after he authored the paper to be the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. 

The Miran paper is the only systemic exegesis of the Trump doctrine in writing thus far. It is no exaggeration to suggest it is a crystal ball into Trump’s mind, revealing his economic vision for the next four years. Its title, “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System,” gives that away.

Miran (and Trump) start from fundamental economic facts. The U.S. is the largest economy in the world today, accounting for approximately 25 per cent of global GDP among the 193 sovereign countries in the United Nations. 

And Miran assumes most businesses from most countries around the world want access to the U.S. economy. This is the U.S. “Trump card.”

Miran clearly indicates the U.S. will use its economic might — not its military might — as its primary instrument of coercion to achieve its strategic objectives.

Moreover, Trump has stated he will create the architecture of a new world order without using soldiers and the military as the principal force de frappe. Or more accurately, the U.S. “soldiers” deployed to increase the hegemon’s power will be Google, Apple, Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft and other American tech giants.

Miran documents and analyzes why Trump believes that the entire postwar international financial architecture, variously called the Bretton Woods system or simply multilateralism, has harmed American interests. 

He states clearly that friend and foe alike took advantage of the U.S. in demanding and obtaining full access to American markets while protecting some segments of their own markets from entry by American corporations.

He argues that the U.S. dollar has been consistently overvalued as it is the world’s reserve currency. This led to a hollowing out of American manufacturing and chronic current account deficits (since 1982) with the rest of the world. However, currency markets did not rebalance by driving down the value of the U.S. dollar.

Currency markets did not adjust because of the high demand for U.S. dollars and U.S. Treasury securities by countries and corporations around the world, as part of macroeconomic policy and corporate strategy of these countries and corporations.

Even worse, according to Miran, since 1945, the U.S. spent trillions on national defence to protect its allies. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Defence spent approximately $1 trillion. Miran notes that many allies did not contribute the two per cent of GDP agreed upon years ago by NATO signatories and thus were free riders benefiting from the U.S. military umbrella.

These flaws in the international system, which, argues Miran, harmed American interests, were compounded by the overvalued U.S. dollar. As he writes, “Demand for reserve assets (by countries and corporations around the world) leads to significant currency overvaluation with real economic consequences.”

Miran argues that a fundamental reshaping of the international monetary system is required to address these ultimately unsustainable imbalances. He rejects past attempts at multilateral currency agreements. He notes multilateral currency agreements will only work if other currencies have U.S. dollars to sell. However, most U.S. dollar reserves are held in Asian and Middle Eastern countries (for example, China holds over $3 trillion) — and these countries are not friendly to the U.S.

Miran notes that as the U.S. has the lowest effective tariff rate in the world at three per cent per the World Trade Organization, it has greater latitude to raise its tariff rates. Miran clearly sees tariffs as a major policy tool to drive the rebalancing to reduce the value of the U.S. dollar relative to other currencies to improve the competitiveness of American manufacturing.

In Miran’s words, “tariffs create negotiating leverage for incentivizing better terms from the rest of the world on both trade and security terms” because “national security and trade are joined at the hip.” This allows Trump to claim that it is a “privilege and not a right” for any foreign firm to enter the U.S. market.

Indeed, Miran argues for a “much stronger demarcation between friend, foe and neutral trading partner.” Friends, he describes, “are inside the security and economic umbrella, but there is more burden sharing” and “may experience more favourable trade or currency terms.”

“Those outside the security umbrella will also find themselves outside friendly arrangements for international trade and easy access to the U.S. consumer,” he adds. “They will have more aggressive costs imposed on them via tariffs and other policies.”

A close reading of the Miran geopolitical analysis of the perceived failures of the international economic system reveals that the Trump doctrine — much as Canadians may intensely detest it — represents an audacious, radical plan to revise the Bretton Woods system of multilateralism in place since 1945, which will address perceived inequities that harmed American interests to the advantage of countries around the world.

If Henry Kissinger — the student of Klemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck — were still alive, he would instantly understand the strategic objectives of the Trump presidency to reorder the entire world economic and financial system using tariffs, to effect currency revaluations to drive capital investment to the U.S.

While Canada’s national and provincial leaders may ignore it, they cannot deny it.

National Post

Ian Lee is an Associate Professor in the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University where he has taught the corporate and business strategy capstone course for 35 years.