Speech · Administration
Bessent at the Economic Club: the doctrine, named and defined.
In an address titled 'American Economic Statecraft in the 21st Century,' the Treasury Secretary supplies the definition in one sentence: the disciplined use of America's economic power in service of our sovereignty.
So tonight, I would like to take the next step and describe our strategy for economic statecraft, by which I mean the disciplined use of America's economic power in service of our sovereignty.
Doctrines cross a threshold when their principals name them. Before this address, American economic statecraft was a description assembled from the administration's practice — legible in its speeches, deducible from its deals, but never claimed by name from a podium. Now it is the title of a formal address by the Treasury Secretary, with a definition attached. A described doctrine can be dismissed as commentary. A named one can be examined, funded, and contested.
The definition rewards parsing. Disciplined excludes improvisation: instruments chosen deliberately, not deals assembled ad hoc. In service of our sovereignty is the test each instrument must pass, and it is the same principle Bessent recovered at the Reagan Forum in May — economic security as national security, stated this time as strategy rather than diagnosis.