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Bluster Meets Markets

The article argues that America under Donald Trump can look more statist than it really is. The president talks as if prices, companies and capital flows should obey political command. Business leaders increasingly speak about industrial policy as a weapon in the contest with China. Yet markets have often proved harder to bend than the rhetoric suggests. Mortgage rates, petrol prices and share prices do not move simply because the White House wants them to.

That gap between show and control is the article’s main subject. The Trump administration has made forceful demands of firms, but many have delayed, ignored or outlasted them when the legal authority, money or political attention behind the demand looked thin. The result is not laissez-faire capitalism. It is a more erratic system in which presidential pressure matters, but rarely amounts to a disciplined command economy.

Tech Shows The Limit

The technology examples make the point sharply. Washington tried to punish Anthropic after the AI company resisted giving the Pentagon unrestricted access to its models. The article says the relationship quickly changed once Anthropic released a model seen as useful for cyber operations. The episode suggests that strategically valuable technology firms can hold leverage over the state even when the state is trying to intimidate them.

The same improvisational quality appears in deals involving China. Rather than settle a clear rule for advanced chips, the administration allowed Nvidia to sell H200 chips in China while taking a 25% share of proceeds. The TikTok transaction described in the article also mixes national-security language with dealmaking: American and Emirati investors gain majority ownership, ByteDance remains involved, and the government expects a fee reported at roughly \$10bn. These are interventions, but they look more like bargaining over rents than central planning.

A Portfolio Is Not A Plan

The article does not deny that the federal government is becoming more active in business. The Pentagon has put money into mineral projects, and the Commerce Department has accumulated interests in companies such as Intel and Westinghouse. Supply chains, chips, critical minerals and defence are now treated as strategic assets rather than ordinary commercial questions.

But scale matters. The government’s largest position cited in the piece, its Intel stake, is worth less than \$20bn. France owns far more in national champions, and Gulf sovereign-wealth funds deploy still larger pools of politically shaped capital. Some of Trump’s interventions also extend tendencies already visible under Joe Biden, from chip subsidies to political resistance around steel ownership. The novelty is often the style, speed and public pressure, not the existence of government involvement itself.

The Takeaway

The article’s closing distinction is between state power that is institutional and state power that is personal. European economic nationalism is described as bureaucratic and rule-heavy. Trump’s version depends more on threats, publicity and the willingness of individual firms to avoid provoking him. That can change behaviour when compliance is cheap. It is much less reliable when companies would need to sacrifice profits, strategy or scarce technology.

Paper Leviathan therefore treats the phrase “state capitalism” with caution. American capitalism is becoming more political, especially around technology and national security. But the state described here is not an all-commanding machine. It is loud, selective and opportunistic, with markets and powerful firms still able to resist it.