As America marks its 250th anniversary, commentary predictably divides between decline and renewal. Is the country fading or entering another period of reinvention? From outside the United States, the answer looks different. Having spent my career allocating capital and building businesses across seventeen countries, I have watched American power the way sailors watch weather: as something that shapes every journey, whether welcome or not. From that vantage point, neither story is right. America is neither declining nor renewing. It is changing the kind of power it holds, and many outside the United States are adapting to that shift faster than America itself.
For three generations, the U.S. was more than the world’s largest economy. It was the operating systems of global commerce. It built an empire of institutions, underpinned the reserve currency, shaped trade rules and set standards others either adopted or worked around. American leadership meant rule-making. The next chapter looks different. America remains indispensable, but is becoming the largest and most influential node in a network it no longer fully controls.
Consider trade. For eighty years, the American project was a rules-based system, imperfect and self-serving in places, but predictable: a manufacturer in Lyon, France or a logistics company in Jebel Ali, UAE could plan a decade ahead. That predictability is gone, and not by accident.
Recent tariff battles illustrate the shift. Trade has been reconceived as an instrument of statecraft; the means are now openly contested at home. The Supreme Court struck down one tariff mechanism this winter, a trade court struck down its replacement in the spring and the executive simply reached for the next statute on the shelf. That uncertainty is changing investment decisions as much as tariff rates themselves. The lesson for global businesses is not which tariff applies, but rather that rules are discretionary and discretion does not show up in a five-year plan.
Organizations have stopped planning for a single world. The multinational of 2010 optimized for efficiency: one supply chain, one manufacturing hub and the lowest landed cost. The multinational emerging today optimizes for optionality. It deliberately maintains redundant suppliers, duplicates production capacity across regions at a premium and treats market access as a variable rather than a certainty. Those redundancies carry a financial cost, but they also function as geopolitical insurance.
This is more expensive, yet it is rational. When the rules can change between the order and the delivery, resilience becomes the strategy. Capital is abundant in this world; certainty is scarce.
The dollar tells the same story. Its share of global reserves is now below 57 percent, its lowest level since the mid-1990s. Central banks continue accumulating gold at a pace not seen in modern memory, while the major emerging economies settle more trade in local currencies.
But anyone forecasting the dollar’s fall is selling something. The reason is unglamorous: there is still no credible alternative capable of replacing the liquidity, legal infrastructure and scale of U.S. capital markets. The Euro is structurally incomplete. The renminbi cannot serve as a reserve asset without a convertibility that Beijing will never permit. Gold is now the store of value. So the world is diversifying into a portfolio—some would say a bedlam—of hedges, not coordinating around a successor to America, and this is eroding the dollar’s share without replacing its function. The result is a more fragmented, higher-friction system with no one able to hold the center.
Which is why the real exposure is the privileges that came with American dominance. America has long been able to borrow cheaply in its own currency because the world needed its paper; the U.S. national debt—now over $39 trillion—was affordable. Net interest (over a trillion dollars a year) has overtaken defense to become the second-largest line in the federal budget. In a February 2025 Hoover Institution paper, the economic historian Niall Ferguson observed: a great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power, because the debt burden draws scarce resources towards itself and limits the outlays that sustain national power. That is the mechanism that matters. The hedge does not break the dollar directly; it works through the lost privilege of cheap money.
Economic leadership degrades first as a fiscal phenomenon—a shrinking capacity to fund the defense budget, industrial policy and the technology contest that decides the future—long before the dollar loses its centrality at all.
And the technology is, perversely, defending that centrality even as geopolitics erodes the trust beneath it. The agentic economy now taking shape needs programmable, instantly settling digital money, and the form it is taking is overwhelmingly the dollar: roughly ninety-eight percent of stablecoins are dollar-pegged, while recent U.S. legislation requires many to be backed by Treasury securities. A.I. is therefore creating a new source of structural demand for dollar-based infrastructure even as governments diversify away from traditional dollar dependence.
The digital shift is reinforcing the dollar in the machine economy and creating new buyers for U.S. debt. While sovereign hedging reduces reliance on the traditional dollar, a new layer emerges alongside it. Fiat currency isn’t vanishing with A.I.; its infrastructure is simply evolving, predominantly in U.S. denominations.
The deeper shift sits beneath the trajectory of the U.S. dollar. As intelligence, in all its newer forms, becomes abundant, the crucial scarcities shift to energy, computing and trust. Energy and computing will not become money, but the terms of trade increasingly accrue to whoever controls them, which is why some Gulf states are positioning accordingly, with deployable capital, cheap power and data centers rising from the ground. That positioning reflects a deliberate diversification of leverage, not a replacement of the American relationship. Gulf capital sees America as a primary partner precisely because it offers something no single alternative does: the combination of deep capital markets, rule-of-law infrastructure and a technology ecosystem that still sets the pace. None of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members is building a replacement order. There is no successor to America.
This clarifies what American leadership now requires, and what it cannot be. The U.S. is unlikely to regain the uncontested rule-making authority it exercised after World War II. That era is closing. Its competitive advantage rests somewhere else: remaining the world’s preferred destination for talent, capital, entrepreneurship and innovation. That is decisive precisely because no one else can build the next order either. But all depends on trust in America.
Trust accumulates slowly and evaporates fast; it is the one form of power that cannot be deployed at the speed at which everything else now moves. In an era of synthetic media, autonomous A.I. systems and geopolitical fracturing, credible institutions become one of the world’s scarcest assets.
America’s first 250 years built a system that the world adopted. The next chapter is about remaining the place where the world’s investors, entrepreneurs and innovators still choose to build. That is a humbler—more durable—form of leadership, and one America would do well to choose, before the choice is made for it.
