How Scott Bessent's 'economic statecraft' aims to justify US coercion

Amid the country’s 250th anniversary festivities, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last month delivered an important address, aiming to present a coherent doctrine of “economic statecraft”.

Stripping away references to one of the nation’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, what remains is a remarkably candid admission: Washington intends to write one set of rules for itself, and another for everyone else. 

The speech was less a strategy than a confession; an articulation of double standards so unselfconscious that it mistakes coercion for principle. In other words, it was yet another display of American exceptionalism.

Bessent claims: “For the better part of a century, the United States was the principal architect and guarantor of an open global economic system that delivered enormous benefits. It raised our allies from the ruins of war, widened the channels of global trade, lifted standards of living, and attained a position of influence that remains unmatched in modern history.”

But he adds that “the success of a system does not absolve us from revisiting its assumptions”.

He then goes on to mistakenly argue that in shaping the postwar order, the US accepted “asymmetries” that served a larger strategic purpose: “We opened our market because it helped to create a more prosperous world. And we tolerated imbalances because American economic strength appeared unassailable.”

The stark reality is that the US accepted asymmetries and imbalances because at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, it obtained the “exorbitant privilege” of having its dollar set as the global reserve currency, enabling it to run huge deficits without consequences, and to project its imperial footprint worldwide.

Death knell for globalisation

In his speech, Bessent remarked that “in recent decades, we’ve watched strategic industries migrate abroad” - but he failed to recognise that the US corporate sector made a deliberate choice to outsource its industrial output, aiming to maximise profits through reduced labour costs, while throwing its own blue-collar workers under the bus.

He outlined US economic statecraft along five largely distorted principles, starting with the notion that “economic security begins with national capacity”.

Spelling out such a principle sounds the death knell for globalisation, so strongly advocated for decades by the US. Past economic policies were based upon the notion that reciprocal economic dependence among nations was positive. 

It is the language of a patron dictating terms to a client, not a sovereign equal engaging in a genuine partnership

No more; Bessent contends that “the nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs is not truly sovereign”, adding that “the nation that reduces its economics to consumption is not truly prosperous” - even though this is what the US has done for decades.

The second principle he outlines is that “America’s openness will be matched by reciprocity”, noting that countries “cannot seek access to our market while denying fair access to theirs”. 

Fair enough, in theory. But the speech never asks whether the US itself has lived by this standard. Washington’s own tariff regime under the current administration has been imposed unilaterally and asymmetrically, often without negotiations, against allies and rivals alike. 

Yet Bessent describes foreign equivalents of these same tools as “retribution” and “exclusion”. When Washington shields its semiconductor or shipbuilding sectors, it is “national capacity”. When Beijing, New Delhi or Brussels do the same, it is a “non-market practice” that “distorts competition”. 

The asymmetry is not incidental; it is the entire architecture of the speech, a pure double standard.

Unipolar aspiration 

Bessent’s third principle - that the US “will write the rules of the next economy” - is perhaps the most revealing line in the entire speech. The treasury secretary frames this ambition as a defence against “authoritarian or mercantilist systems” that write standards “for their own advantage”. 

But the explicit goal of unilaterally authoring the rules of digital assets, AI governance and payment systems is itself a mercantilist ambition, dressed in the language of openness. 

Genuine multilateralism would mean negotiating standards with partners as equals. What Bessent describes instead is a unipolar aspiration: rules made in Washington, for Washington’s benefit, that others are expected to adopt as the price of market access.

Perhaps the starkest double standard appears in the fourth principle, where Bessent frames the dollar’s centrality and US sanctions power as instruments of order rather than coercion. 

He warns that countries “cannot participate in the dollar-based financial system while serving as conduits for the evasion of sanctions” - as though sanctions themselves were a neutral, rules-based mechanism, rather than a unilateral tool wielded outside any multilateral legal framework. 

The US has weaponised the dollar’s reserve status to freeze central bank assets, sever entire economies from the Swift financial circuit, and impose secondary sanctions on third countries that merely trade with sanctioned states. 

This is precisely the kind of “weaponisation” that Bessent claims to condemn when warning that attempts by adversaries to “manipulate markets” or “coerce our partners” would “not go unanswered”.

The speech never confronts the irony: the dollar system he describes as a benevolent public good is simultaneously the chokepoint that Washington uses to coerce.

Selective application

In the last of his five principles, Bessent clarifies that “the purpose of American economic statecraft is to connect national power with household prosperity”. He further emphasises that the US needs “an economy in which our working families are not merely consumers of what the world produces, but participants in what America builds”.

As mentioned above, the speech invokes Hamilton’s warning that a nation must “possess within itself all the essentials of national supply” to be truly sovereign.

Of course, this is a legitimate concern - but one that Washington has historically denied to others. For decades, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, both heavily influenced by US Treasury policy, have conditioned loans to developing nations on trade liberalisation, privatisation, and the dismantling of exactly the kind of protective industrial policy that Bessent now embraces for the US. 

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Structural adjustment programmes forced open markets in Latin America, Africa and Asia under the banner of “free trade”, often gutting local industry. Now that the US itself feels exposed by globalisation’s consequences, sovereignty and self-sufficiency are recast as Hamiltonian virtues.

Bessent insists that the US “possesses many tools at its disposal to remedy practices that distort trade and undermine reciprocity”, and that it will “always seek to use those tools judiciously” - yet he immediately follows this with a warning that Washington “will never hesitate to use them decisively”. 

This pairing - soft rhetoric, hard threat - recurs throughout his speech. It is the language of a patron dictating terms to a client, not a sovereign equal engaging in a genuine partnership.

Ultimately, the speech is candid in a way few US Treasury statements ever are: it openly declares that the postwar order’s “asymmetries”, tolerated when they served American strategic interests, must now be corrected - but only in Washington’s favour. 

Reciprocity, sovereignty and fair competition are presented as universal principles; yet they are applied selectively, and only when they benefit Washington.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.