Trump’s Plan to Restore US Financial Dominance
Behind the seeming chaos of Trump’s tariff policy, there’s a coherent plan to reboot what Peter Gowan dubbed the “Dollar–Wall Street Regime.” The goal is to strengthen US power around high-tech digital oligarchs, and it might yet succeed on its own terms.
US president Donald Trump attends the annual Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House on April 21, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
Cultural politics aside, MAGA is a coherent conservative-nationalist project through and through. It aims primarily to restore some interconnected variables that were set up following the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971.
MAGA seeks to maintain the centrality of the US executive in world politics via hub-and-spoke arrangements, along with the indisputable primacy of the dollar and the US Federal Reserve in global currency markets and the international monetary system, recycling global surpluses into the US proper via Treasury bills.
The project also aims to uphold the offshore power of Wall Street, guaranteeing unlimited cross-border financial operations and subordinating the productive sectors of vassal states to the United States. This integrated whole is what the late Peter Gowan, in his prizewinning 1999 book The Global Gamble, called the Dollar–Wall Street Regime (DWSR).
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