STRATEGIC

Option I: “Come Home America”: Domestic Renewal, International Restraint 153
based economic system that has been the foundation of global growth
and prosperity, as well as generating steady domestic growth sufficient
to improve domestic standards of living.
The essential goal of the “Come Home America” posture is to
renew the sources of domestic strength as the primary means of preserving
the U.S. ability to shape and stabilize the world. It differs from
the others in two main respects. First, it assumes that mounting debt
and political strife have already restricted the country’s ability to plan,
execute, and sustain an economic or geopolitical strategy. Second,
it questions the wisdom of unchecked globalization. It might adopt
national policies to boost manufacturing, emphasize fair trade over
free trade, and reject international agreements that mandate changes
to U.S. regulations. It would, in essence, trade some foreign assistance
and the expense of U.S. military power for a higher standard of living
at home.
As Shatz argues in an earlier volume of this Strategic Rethink
series, three trend lines suggest that many Americans will have trouble
achieving rising standards of living. 7 Two of these trends are domestic:
the federal budget and the labor market. One is international: weakness
in the economies of the most important U.S. allies, the EU, and
Japan. This strategy assumes there is little Washington can do directly
to improve its friends’ economies. It can help indirectly by avoiding
war—by deterring Russia and China, working to end the conflicts in
Syria and Iraq as soon as possible, and allowing the repatriation of
refugees now in Europe. Therefore, the United States must prioritize
improving its long-term fiscal outlook and the domestic labor market.
Under this strategic concept, the United States would not seek
new international trade agreements and might attempt to renegotiate
NAFTA or other existing agreements or to pair them with more forceful
measures to combat both job losses and declines in wages for lesseducated
Americans. It would scrap the TPP and accept that China
is likely to be part of whatever agreement follows it. There is some
evidence that this could result in more middle-skill jobs. However, the
actual effect on the number of jobs is uncertain because there would be
7 Shatz, 2016, pp. 9–25.