OPINION:
President Trump is the most activist president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
No institution is safe from his scrutiny, but entering his final three years, we should consider the global challenges that confront the nation, no matter who controls Washington.
Regardless of its origins, climate change is here.
Whether Americans employ fossil fuels or sunshine and wind, U.S. policy can’t appreciably stem a warmer planet.
Rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures are instigating more intense, rapidly escalating storms, droughts and wildfires, rendering farms less productive and driving large migrations within, among and from developing nations.
Securing our borders and measuring immigration to our advantage, fortifying coastal and river cities, and adjusting America’s housing stock are imperative.
More costly disaster insurance, similar to high interest rates, is making homeownership less attainable. Agriculture in significant parts of the American Southwest is becoming less practical, and building near California’s forests and many Eastern coastal areas is irresponsible.
Russian ruler Vladimir Putin is determined to reassert control of Eastern Europe, and President Xi Jinping is preparing China’s military to take Taiwan as early as 2027.
American high-tech is powered by Nvidia chips, fabricated in Taiwan, using machinery from the Netherlands.
Whether the Taiwanese and Europeans deserve our protection is irrelevant; their security is our security.
Artificial intelligence and robots are coming for our jobs. Still, we must lead in AI, or China will. The military applications for AI make that existential.
Tariffs and industrial policies can reshore the automotive, rare earths, pharmaceutical and other supply chains, but those won’t generate enough employment to create a nostalgic rendering of 1950s prosperity.
American technology companies such as Nvidia, Alphabet and Anthropic require global markets to generate the profits and investments necessary to succeed.
With or without tariffs, globalization is an imperative, not a choice. If America doesn’t constructively engage in international commerce, China will dominate.
Birth rates have declined throughout the West, and that is now coming to bear in our economy.
During the first Trump and Biden presidencies, the U.S. economy grew 2.5% a year, well above what economists consider sustainable.
In the summer of 2023, unemployment was 3.7%. Yet exceptional growth continued, and the economy added 174,000 jobs a month.
Illegal immigrants supplemented the 90,000 new workers that indigenous population growth and Biden-era legal immigration policies could sustain.
Indigenous population growth can provide only about 24,000 new workers a month.
As important, immigrants fill about one-fifth of STEM positions and more than two-fifths of doctoral-level science and engineering roles.
Hence, we need more than 1 million carefully selected legal immigrant workers annually. That’s a lot more than Mr. Trump’s policies permit.
All this gives us our to-do list.
We need to incentivize our states to harden our cities and pursue more responsible land use policies. Meddling in flood and homeowner’s insurance markets encourages irresponsible development in vulnerable locations and won’t stop the floods and fires.
Instead of quarreling over electric versus internal combustion vehicles, natural gas versus wind power, and free trade versus industrial policies, we need to reorder our priorities and influence those of Western allies.
We need to spend at least 5% of gross domestic product, not the current 3.4%, on defense.
Canada, our European allies and Japan are raising spending on hardware, but they need to build and staff much larger fleets and standing armies. That’s required to face down Russian and Chinese expansionist ambitions in the Arctic, in Eastern Europe, and in the Strait of Taiwan, the Sea of Japan and the South Pacific.
We need a carefully reordered immigration policy to admit workers in the skill areas required to accomplish 2.5% to 3.5% GDP growth.
That’s necessary to create enough businesses to absorb workers displaced by AI in established firms.
That’s possible with AI properly deployed to boost productivity.
We need to shape up higher education to place a much greater emphasis on the historic mission of state universities: educating more Americans to be technologists, scientists and engineers and fewer students in the humanities and social sciences.
The free trade order of the pre-Trump years was ruinous, but so are tariffs that scaled up to the current 17%.
We need to audit our supply chains to root out dependencies on China and less reliable friends such as India, relocate those activities to safer places and keep the tariffs high on them.
Mr. Trump’s initiatives on rare earth minerals are a good start, but we need equally aggressive approaches for pharmaceutical precursors, semiconductors and everything else we can’t do without in a crisis.
We should negotiate lower tariffs with Canada, Europe and Japan, with the understanding that their barriers to our technology exports must be removed.
Britain, France and other allies still impose digital services taxes that are burdensome tariffs on our high-tech services.
We shouldn’t return to promiscuous immigration and trade policies, but hard-headed, pragmatic internationalism is in order.
• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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