Steve Forbes, chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media and a two-time presidential candidate, says the U.S. needs to show economic and political leadership as “the world is unraveling.”
He says the stagnant global economy and growing isolationist sentiment throughout the world are the “two principal sources of this global malaise.”
“As the U.S. under Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s, we must take the lead on pro-growth reforms, such as a massive tax cut and stopping the central bank’s perversions of our credit markets,” he writes on Forbes.com. “Other nations will follow suit, just as they did more than three decades ago.”
The U.S. can’t withdraw from a world plagued with terrorist attacks, an aborted military coup in Turkey and aggressive actions by China and Russia, he says. President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump are wrong to support the withdrawal of the U.S. from the world stage.
“Barack Obama deeply believes the leftist canard that the U.S.–and before us, the European imperialist states–is the source of all the world’s woes,” Forbes says. “But the 1930s showed us what happens when aggression is not forcefully countered. That’s why the U.S. has been the free world’s leader since WWII. No other democracy has the strength and global reach to do this job.”
Barriers to free trade aren’t the answer to get the U.S. economy growing stronger, he says.
“Pro-growth structural changes in fiscal and monetary policy would lead to rapid revivals of dead-in-the-water economies,” he says. “Such reforms do not include blowing up the global trading system with new tariffs and other barriers to commerce. There are plenty of remedies on hand today to deal with actual trade abuses.”
© 2025 Newsmax Finance. All rights reserved.