For most of the past eighty years, the United States set the terms of global trade. Companies built supply chains around predictable rules, low tariffs and the assumption that today's arrangements would still hold in a decade. That assumption no longer applies. Tariffs have become a routine tool of statecraft rather than an exception, and legal challenges to trade measures now arrive with little warning. Executives who once optimised purely for cost have had to rebuild their planning around the possibility that a supplier, a route or a market could become unreliable overnight.

This has not been cheap. Firms are paying for redundancy: duplicate suppliers, additional warehousing, and contracts written to survive sudden policy shifts. None of this shows up neatly on a balance sheet as "geopolitical insurance," but it is increasingly how multinational finance departments describe their spending.

The dollar tells a similar story of adjustment rather than collapse. Its share of global reserves has slipped below 57%, and central banks have been buying gold at a pace not seen in decades. Read in isolation, this looks like flight from the dollar. Read alongside the alternatives, it looks more like hedging. The euro lacks a single fiscal authority behind it. The renminbi is not freely convertible and China maintains capital controls that make it impractical as a reserve currency at scale. No serious alternative has emerged, which is one reason the dollar remains dominant even as its grip loosens slightly each year.

The more pressing risk to American influence may be domestic. US national debt has passed $39 trillion, and the cost of servicing it is rising as interest rates remain elevated. Net interest payments are beginning to compete directly with spending on defence, research and industrial policy, the very areas that have historically underpinned American strategic weight. A government spending an ever larger share of its budget simply paying interest has less room to invest in the technologies and capabilities that sustain its influence abroad. This is not an abstract concern for economists; it shapes what Washington can credibly promise allies and rivals alike.

Curiously, the technology sector is reinforcing the dollar's position even as governments hedge against it. Stablecoins, the digital tokens increasingly used in cross-border payments, are overwhelmingly pegged to the dollar, with around 98% backed by US Treasury securities. As artificial intelligence systems begin transacting and settling payments autonomously, much of that activity is being built on dollar-denominated infrastructure by default. The data centres, chips and energy contracts underpinning the AI boom are similarly priced and financed largely in dollars. This creates a structural demand for dollar assets that has little to do with traditional reserve management and everything to do with where the technology happens to be built.

Put together, these threads suggest something other than decline or resurgence. The scarcities that mattered most a decade ago, capital and market access, are giving way to different constraints: energy supply, computing capacity and institutional credibility. Washington's task is no longer to write the rules for everyone else to follow. It is to remain the place capital, talent and infrastructure prefer to gather, even when other governments are actively working to reduce their dependence on it. That is a narrower form of leadership than the postwar version, but it is not a weak one, and businesses and foreign governments appear to be adjusting to this reality faster than American policymakers themselves.

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