Trump advisor reveals tariff strategy: Force countries to pay tribute to maintain US empire

The top economic advisor to President Donald Trump has revealed that Washington is using tariffs as leverage to try to force countries to pay the United States to help it maintain its global empire.

The chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, delivered a speech on April 7 in which he outlined the Trump administration’s tariff strategy. An official transcript of his remarks was published by the White House.

Miran claimed that the United States provides two main “global public goods”: one, a “security umbrella” overseen by the US military; and two, the dollar and Treasury securities, which are used as the main reserve asset in the international financial system.

“Both of these are costly to us to provide”, he complained. “President Trump has made it clear that he will no longer stand for other nations free-riding”.

Speaking on behalf of the Trump administration, Miran insisted that “there needs to be improved burden-sharing at the global level”, adding that, “If other nations want to benefit from the U.S. geopolitical and financial umbrella, then they need to pull their weight, and pay their fair share”.

In short, the Trump administration is arguing that foreign countries must help “bear the costs” of running the US empire. Washington threatens high tariffs on nations unless they agree to make significant concessions that benefit the US economy at the expense of their own, as part of a hypothetical “Mar-a-Lago Accord”.

Trump admin seeks to “preserve” US global “military and financial dominance”

The Trump administration is not trying to dismantle the US empire; on the contrary, it wants to strengthen it. Stephen Miran, speaking as Trump’s top economic advisor, emphasized this.

“Our military and financial dominance cannot be taken for granted, and the Trump administration is determined to preserve them”, he said.

“The President has been clear that the United States is committed to remaining the reserve [currency] provider, but that the system must be made fairer”, Miran added.

Trump has threatened 100% tariffs on BRICS members and any nations that try to dedollarize and challenge the hegemony of the US dollar in the international financial system.

In the Q&A session following his April 7 speech, Miran stressed (emphasis added):

I don’t think that dollar dominance is a problem. I think that dollar dominance is a great thing. It has some side effects, which can be problematic, and I would like to find ways to ameliorate the side effects, so that dollar dominance can continue for decades, in perpetuity. I think that would be fabulous.

What are those negative side effects to which Miran referred? He highlighted that the fact that the dollar is the global reserve currency has meant that the United States must run chronic, “unsustainable trade deficits”, and he lamented that this system has “decimated our manufacturing sector”.

This is an implicit acknowledgement of the Triffin dilemma, which was identified by economist Robert Triffin back in 1960. He warned that there is a fundamental contradiction in the domestic monetary policy of the country issuing the global reserve currency.

The United States must run current account deficits (trade deficits with the rest of the world) to provide liquidity to foreign countries, which need dollars in order to use them in international trade and hold them in their foreign exchange reserves.

However, Trump wants to use tariffs to force countries with trade surpluses to buy more from the US, ending these deficits that are necessary to sustain the dollar system — which Trump also, paradoxically, is obsessed with preserving.

Trump presents 5 demands for other countries to pay the United States

In other words, the Trump administration wants to have its cake and eat it too: It seeks to benefit from this imperial system, while minimizing the negative side effects.

In his April 7 speech, Miran outlined five ways by which the Trump administration wants foreign nations to “pay their fair share” to the US empire:

First, other countries can accept tariffs on their exports to the United States without retaliation, providing revenue to the U.S. Treasury to finance public goods provision. Critically, retaliation will exacerbate rather than improve the distribution of burdens and make it even more difficult for us to finance global public goods.

Second, they can stop unfair and harmful trading practices by opening their markets and buying more from America.

Third, they can boost defense spending and procurement from the U.S., buying more U.S.-made goods, and taking strain off our servicemembers and creating jobs here.

Fourth, they can invest in and install factories in America. They won’t face tariffs if they make their stuff in this country.

Fifth, they could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods.

When Miran proposed that countries “simply write checks to Treasury”, he was alluding to the idea that foreign governments should buy very long-dated US Treasury securities, such as 100-year bonds, with low yields. These would lose value over time, with inflation, in effect subsidizing Washington.

Miran made similar recommendations in a report he published in November 2024 — the month that Trump won the US presidential election. It was titled “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System”.

He wrote in the document, “We may be on the cusp of generational change in the international trade and financial systems”.

Miran argued that the “root of the economic imbalances lies in persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents the balancing of international trade, and this overvaluation is driven by inelastic demand for reserve assets”.

The speech he delivered on April 7, in his capacity as the chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers, echoed many of the points he made in his November 2024 report.

Trump admin thinks USA can win trade war with China

The Trump administration plans to wage trade war and impose high tariffs on any country that refuses to meet its demands.

Beijing is the main target of Trump’s aggressive trade war. He has hit China with enormous tariffs of 125%.

In his speech, Miran repeatedly referred to Beijing as “our biggest adversary”. He made it clear that the United States seeks economic decoupling, and would like to create new supply chains that exclude China.

Beijing has defended itself, blasting the US government’s “unilateral bullying”, while insisting that “there are no winners in a trade war”.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce asserted, “If the US insists on this wrongful path, China will be ready to fight to the end”.

However, Trump’s top economic advisor argued that the United States could win a trade war with China. He stated:

Countries that run large trade surpluses are pretty inflexible—they can’t find other sources of demand to substitute for America’s. Instead, they have no choice but to export, and America is the largest consumer market in the world. By contrast, America has plenty of substitution options: we can make stuff at home, or we can buy from countries that treat us fairly instead of from countries that take advantage of us. This difference in leverage means that other countries end up bearing the cost of tariffs.

Miran made it clear that the US government is playing an economic game of chicken with China, and it hopes that Beijing will blink first.

In the meantime, US economists warn that average working-class Americans will suffer the consequences, as tariffs will cause inflation to rocket higher, eating into their disposable income.

Can a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” reshape the US-dominated international financial order?

What the Trump administration is trying to do is reshape the global empire that the United States constructed at the end of World War Two, when the other major powers in the world were in ruins and the US was the only dominant economic power.

At the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, the United States designed the international financial order, with the dollar at its center. This gave the US the “exorbitant privilege” of printing the global reserve currency.

US financial capitalists on Wall Street have been the principal beneficiary of this imperial order. But Trump now complains that it is too “costly” to maintain.

The US plows trillions of dollars into running its global empire, with around 800 foreign military bases.

Nevertheless, Trump does not want to replace this system with something more equitable, by giving other countries more influence. Instead, he seeks to further concentrate power in the United States, demanding tribute from the rest of the world.

The grand deal that Trump hopes to oversee has been loosely referred to as a “Mar-a-Lago Accord”. As the Financial Times put it, “The US president wants both to protect domestic manufacturing and hold the dollar as the reserve currency”.

This idea is based on the Plaza Accord of 1985, in which the Ronald Reagan administration forced US allies Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and West Germany to allow the United States to devalue the dollar against their currencies, in an attempt to make US manufactured goods more competitive.

The Plaza Accord devastated Japan’s economy by significantly overvaluing the yen, which hurt the competitiveness of Japanese exports — thereby helping US technology companies that previously had trouble competing with their Japanese counterparts. It also fueled Japan’s gargantuan asset price bubble, which popped in the early 1990s, leading to a “lost decade” of economic stagnation.

Trump would like to impose his economic and political conditions on the world, but many countries are likely to reject this.

US allies and vassals may agree to a hypothetical “Mar-a-Lago Accord”, like they did in 1985, but China — which is the world’s largest economy, when its GDP is measured at purchasing power parity — has refused to give in to Trump’s economic blackmail.

Chinese economists and policymakers have carefully studied the destructive effects that the Plaza Accord had on Japan, and it is extremely unlikely that they would repeat the same mistake.

Neoconservative Hudson Institute

Trump’s top economic advisor, Stephen Miran, delivered this April 7 speech at an invite-only, closed-door event at the Hudson Institute, a neoconservative Washington, DC-based think tank.

The Hudson Institute is funded by right-wing billionaire oligarchs like Harlan Crow, a major Republican Party donor; Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul behind Fox News and other influential conservative outlets; and financier Charles Schwab.

Other top donors to the Hudson Institute include powerful US corporations such as AT&T, Blackstone, Chevron, Meta, and Walmart; as well as Pentagon contractors in the military-industrial complex, like BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.

Taiwan province’s representative office in the US also finances the neoconservative think tank, which is vehemently anti-China.

On stage during Miran’s talk, the Hudson Institute displayed four flags: those of the United States, Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.