Movistar Plus has premiered "US: The New World Economy" (EE. UU.: la nueva economía mundial), a French documentary directed by Hugo Van Offel that sets aside President Donald Trump's daily controversies to lay out the economic strategy Washington is using to try to contain the rise of China.
The 52-minute film, produced by AH! Production and ARTE France, argues that behind what often looks like a string of improvised decisions by Trump lies a recognizable economic project built on tariffs, pressure on other countries, access to critical resources and threats of annexation, all aimed at reinforcing American hegemony and slowing China's advance.
A 'dead cat' political strategy
The review opens by describing the so-called "dead cat strategy," popularized in 2013 by former London mayor and UK prime minister Boris Johnson, who credited it to Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby. The idea: when a subject becomes uncomfortable, introduce another one loud, grotesque or scandalous enough to hijack the conversation.
Trump, a longtime associate of Johnson, appears to have mastered the technique. He is known for his posts on Truth Social, his on-again relationship with Elon Musk, his running feuds with late-night talk shows, and military actions such as the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and the war with Iran. Almost two years after his re-election, it is easier to list his controversies than to explain what his administration is actually doing at home, from changes inside the federal government to cuts to rights, shifts in immigration policy and the real effects of his economic decisions.
The people shaping the strategy
To make sense of that, the documentary focuses on the people giving the strategy shape. They include Peter Navarro, one of Trump's chief trade advisers and one of the most forceful defenders of his tariff policy, and Jørgen Boassen, a Greenlandic bricklayer and Trump activist who acts as an informal link to the MAGA movement, and who the review says seems to have stepped out of a political sitcom.
Liberation Day and the McKinley model
The film opens on April 2, 2025, when Trump stood in the White House garden with a board of tariffs under his arm and declared the country's "Liberation Day." The move was presented as an act of economic emancipation, promising a return of factories, jobs and industrial greatness supposedly given away to the rest of the world.
Trump repeatedly invokes William McKinley, the late 19th-century US president who made protectionism and territorial expansion two of his central causes, as something of a model. But one of the documentary's more interesting arguments, according to the review, is that this display of strength is really a fairly explicit admission of weakness.
Rare earths, Greenland and the race for resources
The United States depends on China for materials essential to phones, cars, batteries, weapons and semiconductors. Beijing dominates the supply and processing chains for rare earths, and when it responded to US tariffs by restricting some of its exports, it quickly showed who held the leverage.
That dependence is driving the search for alternatives, and it is why Greenland no longer looks like one of Trump's eccentric whims. Beneath the ice lie rare earths and other critical minerals that Washington has long been trying to pull out of China's orbit.
USAID's dismantling and the Congo connection
While this new version of the conquest of resources plays out, others are cashing in. The documentary links the dismantling of USAID, the US international development agency, to a new model of relations Washington is offering some of the world's poorest countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Congo has ended up paying millions to lobbying firms tied to Trump's circle while negotiating US access to reserves of cobalt, lithium and coltan, the review notes. It calls it an efficient system: aid disappears first, and then someone well-connected appears, ready to charge for explaining how to get it back.
A necessary if surface-level watch
The review notes that "US: The New World Economy" leans on references that require some prior grasp of both the US economy and recent geopolitics, so it is not an introductory documentary. Its 52-minute runtime also forces it to race through subjects that could fill hours, leaving it, inevitably, on the surface.
Even so, the review calls that surface interesting and necessary, because for a while the film manages to clear the dead cat off the table and show what is happening behind it: an America trying to avoid, or at least delay, something that looks increasingly plausible, losing global hegemony to China. Now, the review concludes, comes the wait for the next dead cat.
