American political commentators have frequently called for the U.S. president to take effective action to improve world economic growth. Such calls are a form of what Matthew Yglesias has dubbed “Green Lanternism”—the unspoken theory that the U.S. president’s ability to affect outcomes is primarily affected by his willpower. In this article, I examine the opposite—and ...

In April 2023, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan begged his listeners’ indulgence for straying out of his lane by delivering a major address about economics. But his actual argument—that decades of free-market zealotry had weakened the country’s national security—was anything but apologetic. “Ignoring economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization ...