Mens byen vågner: The American Toll Booth and Europe's Industrial Dilemma

With associate professor Cornel Ban, CBS

Is the United States truly reindustrialising — or has it found a new way to exercise power?

Political rhetoric in Washington speaks of a manufacturing renaissance: tariffs raised, supply chains reshored, allies pressured into massive investment commitments. But behind the narrative of revival lies a more structural transformation of American political economy.

In this lecture, Cornel Ban argues that the United States is no longer competing primarily as an industrial system. Instead, it increasingly operates as a geopolitical “toll keeper”: controlling access to markets, financial infrastructures, energy flows, and security guarantees — and leveraging that position to shift costs onto others.

Meanwhile, Europe faces a paradox. The EU remains a formidable industrial exporter, with strong positions in machinery, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and advanced manufacturing. Yet this very production depth makes Europe vulnerable in an era where trade policy is openly weaponised and economic interdependence becomes a tool of coercion.

The lecture explores:

• The difference between industrial capacity and geopolitical leverage
• Why U.S. trade deficits and employment data complicate the story of an American manufacturing revival
• Europe’s export dependence and strategic exposure
• What it means when escalation replaces production as the main instrument of economic power

Are we witnessing the end of globalisation — or the rise of a new, post-industrial form of imperial strategy?
And can Europe rethink its industrial and geoeconomic strategy in a world where production has once again become a strategic asset?

This lecture offers a sharp and timely analysis of the shifting transatlantic balance and the emerging logic of geoeconomic competition.