Wednesday, March 25, 2026
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. EDT
Location: Online Zoom
March 25, 2026
When the Hegemon Goes Rogue: How to Adapt to Washington's Belligerent Foreign Policy
Event Series: Latin America and the Geopolitical and Economic Transition: How to Harness the Revolution
The Georgetown Americas Institute is pleased to host Paul Krugman to explore the challenge posed by the United States' turn against the liberal world order it helped build in the aftermath of World War II. From tariffs to threats of occupation and outright military interventions, the Trump administration’s belligerent approach to both rivals and allies has upended the norms and institutions that shaped international relations in the postwar era. It is undermining security arrangements and threatening the economic integration that underpinned much of the world’s prosperity. Countries must figure out how to cope with Washington’s hostility and perhaps how to shape a new order that skirts around the United States.
Krugman is one of the world’s most eminent living economists, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008 and the John Bates Clark award of the American Economic Association in 1991. He is a research professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. For 25 years he wrote a column in the New York Times. In December of 2024 he took his writing to Substack.
This is the fourth session in the event series Latin America and the Geopolitical and Economic Transition: How to Harness the Revolution, which aims to examine how shifting long-term currents are affecting the world, their potential impact on Latin America, and how the region should adapt and react. The region has historically lived in the shadow of the United States while drawing closer to China. It possesses vast natural resources yet continues to search for a path toward equitable and sustained prosperity. It is a heterogeneous set of countries with a shared history, split by deep rivalries, yet strengthened by the enduring idea of a regional identity. It is imperative that Latin American leaders confront these forces of transformation with clear eyes.
Featuring
Paul Krugman is an American economist and journalist who received the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in economic geography and in identifying international trade patterns. He also wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times (1999 to 2024). Krugman was awarded a B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He served as a member of MIT’s economics faculty from 1979 to 2000, leaving for a year (1982 to 1983) to work as the chief staffer for international economics on U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and again for a hiatus (1994 to 1996) to teach at Stanford University. In 1979, he also worked as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2000 he became a professor of economics and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University; he retired in 2015 as professor emeritus. He subsequently became a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Through the integration of economies of scale into general equilibrium models, Krugman furthered understanding of both the determinants of trade and the location of production in an increasingly globalized post-World War II economy. His research findings explained how the consumer’s desire for variety and choice enabled countries to achieve the economies of scale required for profitable trade in similar products. This led to later research on the “new economic geography,” which explained the location of jobs and businesses and the reason there was acceleration in the pace of urbanization and a population decline in rural areas.
Eduardo Porter writes “Being There” on Substack and has a regular column in the Guardian. Porter worked for nearly two decades at the New York Times, and he also wrote for the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Opinion, and the Washington Post. He has reported from Tokyo, London, São Paulo, and Mexico City. He is the author of American Poison (2020), on how racial hostility shaped the American social contract, and The Price of Everything (2011), an exploration of the cost-benefit analyses that underpin human behaviors and institutions. Born in Phoenix, he grew up in the United States, Mexico, and Belgium, and he now splits his time between Mexico City and Brooklyn.
Alejandro Werner is the founding director of the Georgetown Americas Institute and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. He recently completed almost nine years as director of the Western Hemisphere Department at the International Monetary Fund. Prior to that appointment, he was undersecretary of finance and public credit in Mexico’s Finance Ministry and held several positions in that ministry and the Central Bank. He also taught at leading universities in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in economics from ITAM.