What’s good for America is good for the world. That’s the message the US was trying to sell at the G7 meeting in Hiroshima. The Biden administration has recently been accused by both allies and adversaries of putting America first, if not alone, in some of its economic policies. But in Japan, the US team tried to connect the dots between their people and place-based domestic economic strategies and their new approach to foreign policy.

Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently gave a speech saying that gross domestic product growth for its own sake isn’t good enough — it must be sustainable and equitable. This is the challenge of the next few decades and a clear move away from the traditional Washington consensus model, which focused on unfettered growth via deregulation and trade liberalisation.

Having succeeded in getting the Europeans, Canadians and Japanese on board with shared clean energy supply chain efforts before the G7, the administration used its time in Japan to push forward the details of what a US-led industrial policy around climate might look like — particularly in the global south. This too, is new — the Washington consensus was all about handing a single playbook of growth to the world. Today’s world is far more multipolar, a reality that the US must acknowledge and adjust to as it attempts to bring a greater coalition of nations into a new economic order — albeit one that does not yet have an entirely unified theory.