As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, comments distinguish between decline and renewal. Is the country dying or entering another period of reinvention? Outside the United States, the answer seems to be different. Having spent my career distributing money and building businesses in seventeen countries, I viewed American power the way sailors view weather: as something that shapes every voyage, whether they are welcome or not. From that point, no story is right. America isn’t going down and it’s not remaking. It is changing the nature of the power it wields, and many outside the United States are adapting to that change faster than America itself.
In three generations, the US was more than the world’s largest economy. They were global commercial applications. It created a state of institutions, supported the money held in it, created the rules of trade and set the standards that others accepted or used. American leadership meant making laws. The next chapter looks different. America remains important, but it is becoming the largest and most influential area in the network that it no longer fully controls.
Consider trade. For eighty years, the American project was a rules-based system, imperfect and autonomous in places, but predictable: a manufacturer in Lyon, France or a transport company in Jebel Ali, UAE can plan ten years in advance. That prediction is off, and not by accident.
The recent tax wars show a change. Trade has been rediscovered as a tool of statecraft; ways are now clearly contested at home. Supreme Court reduced one way of the tariff this winter, the commercial court hit its place in the spring and the officer just reached for the next session on the shelf. That uncertainty changes investment decisions in much the same way as the tax rate itself. The lesson of global business is not which charge works, but rather that laws are discretionary and wisdom is not reflected in the five-year plan.
Organizations have stopped planning a single world. The international world of 2010 is designed for efficiency: one supply chain, one production site and the lowest cost of landing. International entrepreneurs today are preparing for a choice. It deliberately avoids redundant suppliers, multiplies production capacity in all regions at a reasonable rate and treats market access as a variable rather than a certainty. That unemployment has financial costs, but it also serves as geopolitical insurance.
This is very expensive, but it makes sense. When rules can change between order and delivery, consistency becomes a strategy. Capital abounds in this world; less certainty.
The dollar tells a similar story. Its share of the world’s treasures now less than 57 percentits lowest level since the mid-1990s. Central banks continue to hoard gold at a pace unseen in modern memory, while major emerging economies settle more trade in local currencies.
But anyone who predicts the fall of the dollar is selling something. The reason is not good: there is still no reliable alternative that can replace the money, the legal infrastructure and the level of US capital markets. The Euro is structurally imperfect. The renminbi cannot function as a reserve asset without conversion which Beijing will not allow. Gold is now a store of value. So the world is diversifying into a portfolio—some would say a bedlam—of hedges, not putting together an American successor, and this ends the dollar’s share without replacing it. The result is a more fragmented, more conflicted system with no one holding the center.
That’s why the real deal is the rights that come with American rule. America has long been able to borrow cheap money with its money because the world needs its paper; US national debt—now more than $39 trillion— was affordable. Total interest (over a billion dollars a year) has gone beyond defense to become the second largest line in the federal budget. In the February 2025 Hoover Institution paper, the economic historian Niall Ferguson commented: superpowers spend more money on debt repayment than security risks that do not threaten superpowers, because the debt burden draws scarce resources towards them and limits the costs that support national power. That is the important way. Hedges don’t exactly break the dollar; works on the lost right of cheap money.
Economic leadership begins to decline as the financial situation—the diminishing ability to finance the defense budget, industrial policy and technological competition determines the future—is long before the dollar loses its greatness at all.
And technology, by contrast, protects that middle ground as geopolitics erodes trust beneath it. The operating economy in the current state needs to be organized, adjust the digital currency quickly, and the path it takes is the strong dollar: almost Ninety-eight percent of stablecoins have dollar pegswhile recent US law requires most to be backed by Treasury securities. AI therefore creates a new source of demand for dollar-based infrastructure as governments diverge from traditional dollar dependence.
The digital shift is strengthening the dollar in the mechanical economy and creating new buyers of US debt. While private hedges are reducing reliance on the traditional dollar, a new layer is emerging around it. Fiat money doesn’t disappear with AI; its infrastructure is developing, especially in US systems.
The best exchange for the US dollar. As intelligence, in all its new forms, abounds, critical shortages shift to power, computing and trust. Power and computing will not be money, but the terms of trade are increasing for whoever controls it, which is why some Gulf states are standing accordingly, with money that can be used, cheap power and data centers that go up in the ground. That placement reflects a deliberate separation of scale, not a replacement for American relations. Gulf capital sees America as a key partner because it offers something that no one else does: a combination of deep financial markets, legal infrastructure and a technological ecosystem that sets the pace. No member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has created an order of succession. No one will replace America.
This explains what American leadership needs now, and what it may not be. The US is unlikely to ever regain the unchallenged hegemony it enjoyed after World War II. That time is closing. Its competitive advantage lies elsewhere: living is the world’s most popular destination for talent, capital, entrepreneurship and innovation. That is decisive because no one else can create the next order. But it all depends on trust in America.
Trust accumulates slowly and evaporates quickly; it is the one type of energy that cannot be used at the speed at which everything else is moving. In an age of artificial media, autonomous AI systems and geopolitical fracturing, trusted institutions are becoming one of the world’s rarest commodities.
The first 250 years of America created a system that was adopted by the country. The next chapter is about remaining a place where investors, entrepreneurs and the world’s founders still choose to build. That is the kind of humble leadership—that lasts—and one America would do well to choose, before it is chosen.
