The Tariff Evangelist

Moulded in the crucible of Wall Street, Stephen Miran has become the intellectual architect of Trump’s economic nationalism.

In 2009, a soft-spoken Harvard PhD candidate named Stephen Miran was knee-deep in modelling macroeconomic policy responses to global crises, poring over papers in an office once graced by Martin Feldstein, a towering figure in American economics. Feldstein, who had served as Ronald Reagan’s chief economic adviser, was famous for challenging conventional wisdom.

Today, 15 years later, the once-anonymous Miran stands at the centre of a global political-economic storm, helping to revive one of the most contentious tools in the policymaker’s arsenal: tariffs.

Following his remarkable political comeback last year, Donald Trump, in his second term as US President, had appointed Miran as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The post, which has generally seen circumspect academic economists, suddenly had a firebrand at the helm. Days later, Trump announced a sweeping hike in tariffs on Chinese imports, raising them to 104 percent, and most recently, again to 125 percent.

Miran, far from offering cautionary notes, championed the move as not only justified but essential. He is the driving force behind Trump’s global tariff wars, rationalizing it behind a framework laid out in a 41-page treatise that Miran had penned just months earlier while at Hudson Bay Capital, a Manhattan-based investment firm.

Titled ‘A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System,’ the document envisions tariffs as more than protectionist tools – as levers of power, a way to force open foreign markets and discipline bad actors. Trade, in Miran’s vision, was not a polite exchange of goods. It was a battlefield.

Miran’s ascent from Wall Street to the West Wing was quiet but methodical. Born into an era where neoliberal consensus reigned supreme, he earned his undergraduate degree from Boston University in 2005, studying economics, philosophy and mathematics. At Harvard, he gravitated toward the controversial Feldstein, whose blend of academic brilliance and political savvy left a lasting impression.

While often at odds with Reagan’s populist instincts, Feldstein managed to leave an intellectual imprint on the administration, showing how one could shape national policy without ever holding elected office. Miran would go further.

Where Feldstein wielded data like a scalpel, Miran has taken a sledgehammer approach. He has rejected decades of post-Cold War economic dogma, questioning the very assumptions that shaped the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and the ‘Pax Americana’ of global commerce.

The term ‘reciprocal tariffs’ may sound like a policy buzzword, but it has deep roots in American history. In the 19th century, the U.S. used tariff reciprocity to build its own industrial base by raising barriers against countries that did not offer favourable terms in return. Miran has invoked this past to argue that America’s current trade deficits are not the natural outcome of global comparative advantage but the result of bad deals, rigged currency systems, and subsidized foreign competition.

Miran’s strategy is to use tariffs as threats in negotiation akin to bullets in a trade war aimed at winning peace on better terms. Unlike earlier protectionists, he sees tariffs not as ends in themselves, but as means toward liberalization on America’s terms. In this, he draws a paradoxical comparison not just with Reaganite supply-siders but even with the likes of Alexander Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt.

There are echoes of Peter Navarro’s economic nationalism and Robert Lighthizer’s hardline trade strategies from Trump’s first term, but Miran brings an ideological depth that sets him apart. Where Navarro relied on industrial policy and Lighthizer on legal aggression through trade tribunals, Miran operates more like a philosopher-strategist, marrying economic theory with geopolitical urgency.

His position also parallels Feldstein’s in one striking way: both saw their advisory roles as platforms for broader political influence. Yet, while Feldstein often found himself reining in Reagan’s impulses, Miran is amplifying Trump’s.

Martin Feldstein was a complex figure: an architect of Reaganomics and a sharp critic of budget deficits, he embodied the tension between free-market orthodoxy and pragmatic policymaking. His career straddled academia and Washington, and his students, like Lawrence Summers and Jeffrey Sachs, went on to shape global economic institutions.

In Miran, Feldstein’s intellectual DNA has taken a new form. Feldstein believed in markets first, diplomacy second. Miran believes in pressure first, diplomacy if it follows. In another era, Miran might have been an academic contrarian. In the age of Trump 2.0, he is reshaping the economic architecture of the world from within the White House.