After decades of domination by the neoliberal consensus, Washington has started to break with that paradigm under recent presidential administrations, including Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s. Their embrace of tariffs and efforts to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity are a departure from previous policy orthodoxy, inspired in part by the rise of China as an economic and geopolitical powerhouse and, in Biden’s case, by the challenge of climate change.

James K. Galbraith is the Lloyd J. Bentsen chair of government/business relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and a professor in government at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously worked on the House Banking Committee and served as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in the early 1980s. An influential heterodox voice on economics, he is the author of several books, including The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008) and Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know (2016).

In his newest release, The Power to Destroy: How Bad Economics Drove America’s Decline, out next month from University of Chicago Press, Galbraith argues that the dominant framework embraced by mainstream economists has had a disastrous effect on US economic policy over the last several decades. In an interview with Jacobin, Galbraith discussed the arguments of The Power to Destroy, including the problems he sees with Biden and Trump’s recent efforts to move beyond the policy orthodoxy and what the future might portend for US financial and military dominance.