Pricing the Global Club: from Public Goods to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Logic of Sovereignty

Abstract Conventional international political economy treats U.S. hegemony as a provider of global public goods, with preferential trade and security commitments fostering stability through open access. This view, we argue, violates the definition of a public good and obscures the club-like nature of the American-led order. This paper develops a Schmittian club-goods framework in which tariffs, dues, and exclusion are instruments of sovereign pricing, and stability emerges endogenously from the elimination of free-riding. In this model, members pay for access through market concessions, defense contributions, and strategic alignment, while non-members face higher tariffs or exclusion. We demonstrate that the Trump administration’s trade policy—characterized by tariffs on allies, higher duties on rivals, and the frequent invocation of sovereign exceptions—is internally coherent within this logic. We formalize the hegemon’s objective as a dynamic pricing problem to balance rent extraction, expense control, and rule-setting advantage. Calibrations for U.S. relations with the European Union, India, and China illustrate how tariff bands, dues thresholds, and repricing events sustain a hierarchical order. This analysis challenges the public-goods myth and reframes stability as a byproduct of enforced hierarchy rather than systemic openness.