The head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, appeared before the Hudson Institute on Monday to offer an off-ramp for the tariff stand-off: a strategy of national resilience that would help re-situate the United States in the field of global commerce. Drawing from an influential paper he published in November, the high-level White House economics aide envisioned a broader recasting of the global economic order — and sketched a way past some potential traps for the American Right.

Some online populists have responded to this trade stand-off by calling for degrowth and arguing that a poorer country with more factories would be more virtuous. Cue the viral memes of sobbing Yuppies labouring in a sock factory. Others have pushed what might be thought of as an autarky agenda, in which the United States can be a completely self-contained economic unit. For proponents of autarky, sky-high tariffs would be a wall against international commerce.

However, both degrowth and autarky have their limits. In the United States, any political party that anchors itself to economic decline is signing its own death warrant. Indeed, the economic dissatisfactions of the neoliberal era arguably gave Trumpian populism an opening in the first place. Autarky is divorced from the American tradition in another sense. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the United States is separated from many trading partners by oceans, access to trade has been an essential policy priority since independence. Early trade battles — such as Thomas Jefferson’s embargo during the Napoleonic era — were in part about securing American participation in global commerce. Even during the high tide of protectionism, the United States relied upon imports from abroad in select trade categories. Today, supply chains are so thoroughly globalised that a comprehensive onshoring agenda would take many years to accomplish. Even if desired, autarky would be a long-term project.

In laying out a strategy of resilience, Miran’s speech offers a view of a third way. Much of his speech focused on currency questions, which could be viewed as a metaphor for the resilience project writ large. Miran claimed that the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency affords benefits for many nations. For instance, it helps nations across the world engage in trade with each other. While the reserve-currency status of the dollar affords certain advantages to the United States, making it easier to deficit-spend, it might also have some economic costs, such as disadvantaging US exports. Miran pitched his resilience strategy as a way not to displace the dollar as a reserve currency, but instead to enact a kind of burden-sharing that makes it possible for the dollar to remain as a reserve currency and that preserves “the global security and trading systems for many decades into the future”.

More broadly, resilience would confront the structural trends — such as US deindustrialisation — that imperil many international arrangements. Miran’s list of possible areas for “burden-sharing” includes foreign nations investing more in US industry, buying more from American defence suppliers, and lowering their tariff and non-tariff barriers to American manufacturing products. All of these piecemeal efforts are compatible with continued global trade. From this perspective, “resilience” could be successful even if there is not complete autarky or if some bilateral trade deficits continue.

The pitch toward “resilience” also suggests the option that the tariffs which Trump announced on “Liberation Day” could in fact be an opening for negotiation, as both Wall Street and many populist economists alike might hope. Far from being a call to isolationism, resilience could in fact involve strengthening certain trade networks. For instance, the transfer of supply chains from the People’s Republic of China to North America could give the United States more room to manoeuvre abroad. Resilience also goes far beyond currency and trade policy. Investing in cutting-edge scientific innovations, tightening the labour market, and building out the American domestic manufacturing infrastructure for key strategic sectors such as medical supplies would be essential components of a broader resilience package.

The rise of populism and the broader shift toward a more multipolar geopolitics are indications that the old paradigm of globalisation is faltering. Resilience rightly understood could be a way of pivoting forward into the next stage of international relations.

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Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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