Building Allied Industrial Capacity: An Operator’s View of American Economic Statecraft

American foreign economic policy is in the middle of a doctrinal reset. In December, President Trump signed the DFC Modernization and Reauthorization Act, raising the agency’s contingent liability from $60 billion to $205 billion. In April, DFC CEO Ben Black gave the clearest statement of American economic purpose abroad in a generation at the Council on Foreign Relations Endless Frontiers retreat, identifying the Economic Security Zone as the framework’s spatial unit and naming critical minerals, energy, and logistics as the coupled investments that have to move together. A week later, Under Secretary Jacob Helberg gathered thirteen allied governments under the Pax Silica Declaration, designated the first 4,000-acre Economic Security Zone in the Philippines, and named the platform American capital is heading toward: the Forward Deployed Industrial Base. An American manufacturing platform on the soil of a trusted partner, AI-native from the foundations up, held by American operators in alignment with American policy.

I have been running the prototype of this concept for a decade.

Próspera is an American-aligned economic zone on an island in the Caribbean. We built it under one Honduran government, ran it through attempted repeal under another, and have continued operating during a live international arbitration over the framework’s repeal. The project is alive and well despite these headwinds. That is the operating record I bring to the debate Washington has now caught up with, and running the prototype through a political reversal and the legal contest that followed has taught us a great deal about which parts of the federal toolkit are still missing if the Trump Administration’s vision for American economic statecraft, and Forward Deployed Industrial Bases, is going to scale into reality.

What Próspera actually is

Próspera was established in 2017 under the Honduran ZEDE framework, a constitutional reform passed in 2013 that created a category of opt-in regulatory zones with their own legal architecture inside Honduran sovereignty. The zone operator, Honduras Próspera Inc., is a Delaware C-corporation with ordinary investor discipline. The legal substrate is English common-law contract architecture, a regulatory framework designed for reciprocity with U.S. and allied legal systems, and treaty-grade investor-state dispute settlement access through CAFTA-DR and the U.S.-Honduras Bilateral Investment Treaty.

Each of these elements combined is what makes the zone underwriteable by American capital and recognizable to allied counterparties. A jurisdiction that does not produce a body of contractual practice American counsel can read, and a forum where breach has consequences, is not a jurisdiction American operators can rapidly deploy capital and resources into.

Our project currently has two sites, one on the island of Roatán and one on the mainland of Honduras in La Ceiba. The Roatán site holds the regulatory and innovation core. It hosts operating businesses across biotech, financial services, and the kinds of high-skill tradable services that benefit most from a stable contract environment, with cutting-edge biotech firms and a robotic construction factory among the current tenant base. The mainland site at La Ceiba is the industrial layer: 400 acres on the Caribbean coast with a working port, currently in active negotiations with American manufacturers, including U.S. companies looking to relocate production out of China and into a U.S.-aligned jurisdiction, all proposing to build on top of the same legal architecture the island has used to attract its tenants. Both sites operate under a single legal framework. More than three hundred companies are now incorporated in the zone, with over $150 million in invested capital and thousands of jobs created.

When the underlying framework was repealed in 2022, the zone kept operating. Tenants stayed and kept investing, the mainland site continued to develop, and across 2022 and 2023, the years immediately following the political reversal, Próspera attracted more than 30 percent of all greenfield foreign direct investment into Honduras. The international arbitration that followed has been the second line of defense, not the first. The first line is that the zone became useful enough, embedded enough, and commercially real enough that shutting it down in practice turned out to be much harder than denouncing it in politics.

That is the kind of operating record the new doctrine needs more of, and it is also the kind of operating record that teaches you which parts of the federal toolkit are missing.

What the prototype teaches about the missing tools

The doctrine the administration has now articulated will not execute without operators willing to deploy. American operators will not deploy without something that addresses the actual reason they sit on the sidelines: political risk. Specifically, the risk that the host country’s legal and regulatory environment will turn against an American project after the project is built, and that no instrument will get the operator’s capital back. The federal toolkit was not designed for that risk in the form it now takes. Six of its blind spots become visible only after a zone has survived politics.

Conventional political risk insurance, to start, does not cover the risks zones actually face. Conventional PRI is built around invested capital and a bounded set of taking events, and the risks an operating zone faces in 2026 are different: regulatory creep, the slow tightening of host-country administrative discretion until the operating environment is degraded without any formal taking; intellectual property misappropriation by state-directed actors; personnel coercion of zone residents and employees; and the chokepoint shocks the analytical literature has now thoroughly mapped, the kind that forced Skydio to ration drone batteries one per unit when Beijing imposed rare-earth sanctions on the company. None of these are theoretical. All of them are real operating risks for a zone in any market the doctrine cares about, and a toolkit that does not cover them does not cover the political risk that keeps American operators on the sidelines.

Allied government commitments without binding instruments are commitments that fluctuate with politics. Pax Silica gathered thirteen governments under a declaration. That is a real diplomatic accomplishment and the necessary first step. But it is also a declaration, not a binding instrument. The durability of the framework over the coming decade depends on whether those commitments get converted into law, with defined terms including waivers of sovereign immunity for suit, execution, and prejudgment attachment, in exchange for the protections the framework offers their FDIBs. Without that conversion, the framework runs on host-government goodwill, and goodwill is exactly the variable that fluctuates when political winds change. We have lived through what that fluctuation looks like.

Equally important is screening potential FDIBs to prevent bad actors and nation-state-level U.S. adversaries from co-opting the framework for their own designs. There are roughly seven thousand zones in the world today, and most of them should never be inside the U.S. framework. The ones that should are identifiable by their level of alignment with U.S. economic statecraft goals: common-law commercial DNA, regulatory reciprocity with the United States, exclusion of adversary participation as a structural condition rather than a marketing claim. Designation is the act that determines whether the framework concentrates American capital in zones that compound American advantage or scatters it across zones that do not.

Recovery, when things go wrong and an American project is expropriated, is the difference between a sustainable program and a transfer program. The risk that matters most for a zone is not garden-variety political violence or conventional expropriation. It is change at the legal-framework level, run with attack patterns that resemble the foreign-interference playbooks the U.S. national-security community recognizes on sight in any other context. We have seen what that looks like at first hand. It moved fast, organized through institutions whose capture-paths were already mapped, and produced legal-framework change that private operators are powerless to counteract. When that happens, the existing toolkit treats recovery as a back-office function, and it often takes decades, if not longer. In a serious framework, recovery should be a central function: pre-identified host-country assets, mandatory asset-freeze authority on claim payment, anti-suit injunction authority where appropriate, multiplied recovery targets, and upside mechanisms that share the rewards of recovery with the U.S. taxpayer rather than treating coverage as a one-way subsidy.

Mandatory consequence is what makes the whole architecture credible to an adversary in the first place. Right now, U.S. response to expropriation of American firms is entirely discretionary, subject to whoever happens to occupy the White House at the time. U.S. response to expropriation of an FDIB has to be predictable and severe enough to deter the next attempt, because only demonstrated consequences act as a credible deterrent against actions of this kind.

Speed is also an issue if we intend to actually compete against and win against China. Federal underwriting also moves at the wrong tempo. Capital moves at the speed of business, with timelines measured in weeks to a few months at most. The federal processes intended to support the movement of that capital in alignment with U.S. foreign policy currently move in quarters to years. That speed was fine when some of these programs began with the Marshall Plan. It no longer works in a world where our adversaries deploy capital in our hemisphere in weeks, not years.

Each of these gaps is a face of the same problem. The existing federal toolkit does not address political risk in the form American operators actually encounter it, and as a result it produces orphan investments that become easy targets rather than the integrated economic ecosystems the doctrine wants to build. No amount of capital sitting behind that toolkit pulls operators off the sidelines, because capital alone has never been the missing input. The pattern is predictable enough that the architecture above the operator can be specified now, before more zones are designated, rather than improvised case by case after they are.

What it would take to scale

Closing the gap means assembling six interlocking capabilities into a single system. Three sit on the front end of the deal. Designation, the screen for which jurisdictions deserve to be inside the framework, only works if it is taken seriously enough to refuse jurisdictions that fail the legal-reciprocity and adversary-exclusion tests. The binding pact is the framework’s spine and the operational form of what Helberg meant when he described allied governments holding skin in the game; an accession-based agreement, similar in legal shape to the WTO or the OECD anti-bribery convention, lets any qualifying partner country sign a single text on standardized terms, accepting waivers of sovereign immunity in exchange for the framework’s protections extending to its certified zones and the partner sharing in the upside of the platform built on its soil. Protection inside a designated zone then has to cover the risks zones actually face today: going-concern value, business interruption, debt service, and the contemporary forms of expropriation conventional coverage does not reach.

Three more sit on the operational and back end. Throughput is the move that lets the program run at the speed capital moves rather than the speed Washington is comfortable with: once a jurisdiction is certified, qualified zone operators should be empowered by an umbrella political-risk-insurance policy from which they issue project-level coverage under federal standards, so that a single designation unlocks coverage for hundreds of underlying investments without re-running federal underwriting on each one. This is the architectural answer to Black’s diagnosis that simply doing more deals is not a solution: $205 billion of contingent liability either scales by structure or it does not scale at all. Recovery, when host governments breach, has to produce real money on real timelines, with pre-identified host-country assets and statutory authority to freeze them on claim payment. And consequence has to attach automatically across financial, trade, and personnel categories rather than at the discretion of whichever administration happens to be in office, because insurance without automatic consequences is not a deterrent and recovery without statutory identity leaves operators asking the State Department “pretty please” in hopes they’ll listen. The Marshall Plan resonance Black invoked depends on this distinction: a program credible to adversaries is what separates economic statecraft from foreign aid.

The framework either assembles these six capabilities into a coherent system, the kind that produces economic ecosystems anchored to U.S. capital markets and insulated against adversary control, or it absorbs the cost in coverage gaps the doctrine cannot afford to carry. A hundred showcase deals is a program; twenty thousand supportable investments across a dozen allied economies is a system, and the difference between the two is the architecture above the operator.

The operators who deploy alongside

Pan American World Airways was the chosen instrument of an earlier American century. From the late 1920s through the 1960s, it functioned as the United States’ de facto international flag carrier under a single founder, Juan Trippe, who pushed routes into Latin America, the Pacific, and Africa years before any official American presence followed on the ground. Trippe was an operator, not a federal contractor; he took commercial risk and made commercial returns, and the strategic position generated by his operating record was the kind of geopolitical asset no contracting officer could buy.

The new doctrine needs operators of that kind across what Helberg named the Forward Deployed Industrial Base, the platform that has to be AI-native from the foundations up, and the right number to start with is small. Three companies sketch the shape clearly enough to argue from: Anduril Industries on the security and autonomous-systems side, Last Energy on power, and Palantir Technologies on the operating layer. Each is an operator rather than a contractor, each already deploys abroad in some form, and each maps onto a specific layer of the capability stack the FDIB requires.

Anduril holds the security and autonomous-systems slot, and the deployment evidence is unusually current: a five-year, A$1.7 billion Ghost Shark program for the Royal Australian Navy, a 7,400-square-meter Sydney manufacturing facility opened in 2025 with roughly 150 jobs and 40 local suppliers, a December 2025 expansion into Japan with sovereign manufacturing partnerships under construction, and parallel industrial commitments in the United Kingdom around Project NYX and the British Army’s land-autonomy work. Last Energy handles power on a build-own-operate microreactor model that is genuinely operator-shaped rather than vendor-shaped, with project work for ten 20-megawatt units in Poland’s Legnica Special Economic Zone, a port-anchored deployment with DP World at London Gateway backed by an £80 million investment, active development in Romania, and a partnership with the NATO Energy Security Centre of Excellence to study deployments on allied installations. The Polish footprint is the cleanest illustration on offer of an FDIB tenant operating inside an existing zone designation rather than describing one. Palantir is the operating layer that ties the rest together, with the Maven Smart System now a Pentagon program of record and a NATO-wide product, a £1.5 billion strategic partnership in the United Kingdom announced in 2025, and Warp Speed serving as a manufacturing operating system inside U.S. industrial reindustrialization.

The three operators compose into the doctrine’s existing geographies cleanly. In the Luzon corridor, where the political work is largely done by the Pax Silica designation, they compose inward from scaled allied electronics manufacturing: Anduril securing port and air approaches, Last Energy planning the long-run baseload power, and Palantir running the joint U.S.-Philippine operational picture across the whole stack. What stays constant is the stack. What changes is the entry point, the host-country interface, and which operator is doing the most work in any given month.

Walter Lippmann, writing in Foreign Affairs in 1927, named a rule that has not aged: American capital abroad survives only when host nations believe it profits them and aligns with their own national interest. Próspera’s posture in Honduras is the operating restatement of that rule, and Black’s reading of the Marshall Plan, Helberg’s “skin in the game / inverse of extraction / platform not tribute” framing, and Trippe and Pan Am all sit inside the same frame. The mid-century American statecraft we should learn from did; the anti-models we should not repeat did not.

The same standard has now been re-articulated by the administration. At the New York Stock Exchange in late April, Assistant Secretary Caleb Orr, moderating a panel at the launch of the United States’ Trade Over Aid initiative, said that property rights and the sanctity of contract are “the basic building blocks of economic prosperity.” We promote them, he said, “not because they are magic, self-regulating, or represent the supposed triumph of ‘neoliberalism’ or anything like that. We promote them because they are what civilized nations do.” That is the right standard. The remaining question is how the United States actually produces those building blocks where they don’t yet hold; asking host countries to honor them is one path, and building zones whose structural protections cause them to hold whether or not the host country’s politics cooperates is another. The DFC’s $205 billion can underwrite the second one if the architecture above the operator exists.

This is the first time in a generation American policy has stated the rule explicitly enough to act on it. The operators who can deploy on it are already here, holding ground commercially in markets the doctrine names as priority. What gets built above them, and how soon, will determine whether the next American century is built or merely described.

Erick Brimen is the CEO of Honduras Próspera Inc. and the chief operating principal of the Próspera Economic Zone in Roatán, Honduras. He has spent the last nine years building and operating the zone under the Honduran ZEDE framework and through its repeal, the international arbitration that followed, and the zone’s continuing commercial operation.