The V-Dem dataset establishes a measurable shift: the United States moved from 2nd to 16th in the project’s state-ownership-of-the-economy ranking during 2025, departing a 22-year run among the four least state-directed economies in V-Dem’s sample. A Guardian opinion column by Eduardo Porter, drawing on the data and on commentary from Cullen Hendrix of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, advances several competing interpretive frames for the shift. Five distinct characterizations appear in the substrate, ranging from national-security strategic positioning to patronage and family enrichment, and the MCDM section below scores each against the documented conduct.

Method choice and why it fits. The analysis uses SMART (Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique), a weighted additive value model, rather than AHP pairwise comparison, ELECTRE outranking, or TOPSIS distance-from-ideal. Three reasons. The option set is small and well-defined: the substrate advances roughly five distinct characterizations of the administration’s intervention pattern, and a method built for ranking a small number of alternatives against explicit criteria is more legible than a pairwise or outranking approach. The criteria are commensurable — each can be scored against the same evidence base. The question is one of best fit to evidence rather than outranking or veto, which makes a weighted additive model appropriate. AHP would impose pairwise judgment overhead without yielding more information; ELECTRE would obscure which criteria drive the ranking; TOPSIS would require constructing ideal and anti-ideal alternatives that are themselves contested.

The options. Five characterizations appear in the substrate, with one partial-dominance adjustment:

  • (A) National-security-driven strategic positioning in competition with China. Porter acknowledges that “in a geopolitical landscape shaped by competition with China, there is a reasonable case to be made for Washington to take equity stakes in industries that are critical for American leadership and security, and which might not develop autonomously in competition with rivals heavily subsidized by Beijing.”
  • (B) Coherent dependency-theory-inspired industrial policy, with a bipartisan-drift inflection. Porter writes that Trump’s “statist leanings” mark “a dramatic break with the market-focused presidencies of his recent predecessors, Democrat and Republican,” and that Trump “has pushed back against globalization since his first term in office, seemingly drawn to the Marxist-inspired dependency theory, which washed across Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s proposing protectionism and state industrial policy as a path to economic development.” Option (B) is therefore read as hybridizing a coherent industrial-policy frame with a bipartisan-drift inflection; a fully separate sixth option (bipartisan state-capitalism convergence) is suppressed because Porter’s column does not develop it independently of the dependency-theory reference, and substrate support for treating it as a stand-alone frame is partial.
  • (C) Attempted autocratic consolidation in the Putin mold. Hendrix is quoted in the column noting that Trump “clearly wants to be king” but that the US’s political economy may not permit autocratic control of the type Putin achieved.
  • (D) Patronage and family enrichment in the Latin American strongman mold. Porter cites Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua as comparators — figures who, in Porter’s words, “saw government as a tool to enrich their families and cement dynasties in power” — and writes that “Trump’s dealings with crypto suggest he views his administration as a road to family riches.”
  • (E) Incoherent or undisciplined lurch without consistent strategic logic. Porter writes that “Trump’s wanton lunge for private assets lacks the discipline required for this kind of strategic positioning.”

The criteria, with elicited weights and rationale. Five criteria, each weighted on a 0–1 scale and summing to 1:

  • C1 (0.20) — Fit with the V-Dem movement’s magnitude and direction. The dataset shows movement to 16th, not a fall into the bottom of the ranking; the US remains below 163 countries in V-Dem’s accounting. Weight rationale: V-Dem is the empirical anchor.
  • C2 (0.25) — Internal consistency with documented conduct: which companies were targeted, on what stated terms, with what observable distributional pattern. Highest weight because conduct is the most directly observable signal.
  • C3 (0.20) — Compatibility with the administration’s stated rationale (national security, anti-communism, counter-China competition).
  • C4 (0.15) — Coherence with the comparative cases the substrate cites (Putin’s Russia, Latin American strongmen, Xi’s China, dependency theory).
  • C5 (0.20) — Accounting for institutional pushback (the Supreme Court’s rejection of the trade-policy takeover, and the market structure that Hendrix identifies as a constraint on autocratic control).

Dominance check and pruning. Before scoring, a partial-dominance check: options (A) and (B) are partially dominated because each assumes a level of strategic discipline the substrate’s own evidence challenges. Porter’s “lacks the discipline required” language applies. Both remain in the scoring because national-security language does appear in the administration’s framing, but the dominance finding is itself a piece of evidence.

Scoring (0–10 per criterion), with substrate tie. C1 is scored uniformly across the five options at 6: a 14-rank drop on a state-ownership scale is consistent with all five frames and does not discriminate among them. The V-Dem magnitude therefore functions as a floor that all five options pass rather than a discriminator. Other criteria vary.

Option (A) — Strategic positioning: C1=6, C2=4, C3=7, C4=5, C5=5. High on stated rationale (the Intel, Westinghouse, and critical-mineral stakes are framed as national-security essential); lower on conduct coherence (Porter: “lacks the discipline required”); modest on institutional constraint (the Supreme Court pushback does not directly defeat a national-security rationale).

Option (B) — Dependency-theory industrial policy (with bipartisan-drift inflection): C1=6, C2=5, C3=4, C4=7, C5=4. Highest on comparative-case fit (Porter explicitly links the “statist leanings” to Marxist-inspired dependency theory of the 1960s and 1970s); lower on stated rationale (the administration does not invoke dependency theory); lower on conduct coherence (the pattern lacks the systematic protectionism the theory would predict).

Option (C) — Putin-mold autocratic consolidation: C1=6, C2=7, C3=4, C4=6, C5=4. Strong on conduct (multiple equity grabs, the “golden share” arrangement with Nippon Steel, threats to trading partners); weak on institutional constraint — Hendrix notes the US political economy “may not let him” and that the kind of autocratic control Trump appears to seek “is much harder to achieve in a modern complex economy” because, as Hendrix puts it, “you can’t simply seize the oil to run the place.”

Option (D) — Patronage / family-enrichment strongman mold: C1=6, C2=8, C3=3, C4=8, C5=5. Highest on conduct (Porter writes that cold-war-era Latin American strongmen “saw government as a tool to enrich their families and cement dynasties in power,” and adds that “Trump’s dealings with crypto suggest he views his administration as a road to family riches”); highest on comparative fit (Porter cites Papa Doc Duvalier and Somoza as comparators); low on stated rationale (the administration does not frame its moves as family enrichment).

Option (E) — Incoherent lurch: C1=6, C2=7, C3=3, C4=4, C5=7. High on conduct (Porter’s “wanton lunge” language directly supports this); high on institutional constraint (the Supreme Court intervention and Hendrix’s analysis both describe institutional friction that a coherent strategy would absorb); low on stated rationale and comparative fit (incoherence by construction has no specified comparator).

Weighted totals. Each option’s score is the dot-product of its vector (C1, C2, C3, C4, C5) and the criterion weight vector (0.20, 0.25, 0.20, 0.15, 0.20). (A) 6×0.20 + 4×0.25 + 7×0.20 + 5×0.15 + 5×0.20 = 1.20 + 1.00 + 1.40 + 0.75 + 1.00 = 5.35. (B) 6×0.20 + 5×0.25 + 4×0.20 + 7×0.15 + 4×0.20 = 1.20 + 1.25 + 0.80 + 1.05 + 0.80 = 5.10. (C) 6×0.20 + 7×0.25 + 4×0.20 + 6×0.15 + 4×0.20 = 1.20 + 1.75 + 0.80 + 0.90 + 0.80 = 5.45. (D) 6×0.20 + 8×0.25 + 3×0.20 + 8×0.15 + 5×0.20 = 1.20 + 2.00 + 0.60 + 1.20 + 1.00 = 6.00. (E) 6×0.20 + 7×0.25 + 3×0.20 + 4×0.15 + 7×0.20 = 1.20 + 1.75 + 0.60 + 0.60 + 1.40 = 5.55. Ranking under base-case weights: D > E > C > A > B.

Sensitivity on weights. Three perturbations are informative. First, raising C3 (compatibility with stated rationale) to 0.35 and lowering C2 to 0.10: A 5.80, B 4.95, C 5.00, D 5.25, E 4.95 — the ranking flips to A > D > C > B = E. The D > E > C > A > B ordering is therefore fragile to the relative weight given to stated rationale versus documented conduct. Second, raising C1 (V-Dem fit) to 0.35, with the residual redistributed: A 5.30, B 5.25, C 5.65, D 6.20, E 5.95 — D > E > C > A > B holds; D’s lead over E widens to 0.25. The base ordering is robust to V-Dem weighting. Third, raising C4 (comparative-case fit) to 0.30 and lowering C3 to 0.10: A 5.15, B 5.55, C 5.75, D 6.65, E 5.50 — ranking shifts to D > C > B > E > A. D still leads, but C and E exchange positions and A falls to last. The base ranking is therefore robust on its top position (D) and fragile on the middle and bottom.

Sensitivity on scores. Three perturbations are informative. First, lowering D’s C2 from 8 to 7: D = 5.75, E = 5.55; D leads E by 0.20. Second, lowering D’s C4 from 8 to 7: D = 5.85, E = 5.55; D leads E by 0.30. Third, raising E’s C5 from 7 to 8: E = 5.75, D = 6.00; D leads E by 0.25. The D > E ordering is robust to ±1 score shifts on its key discriminator cells.

What the substrate supports and where it does not. The MCDM exercise is bounded by what the package establishes. The V-Dem ranking movement is sourced to V-Dem as reported by Porter. The more-than-$10 billion equity-stake figure and the named companies (Intel, Westinghouse, critical-mineral mining ventures) are sourced to Porter. The Nippon Steel “golden share” arrangement, the Supreme Court’s rejection of the trade-policy takeover, and the Trump quotes (“STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT,” the “defeat communism” advertisement, the proposed $5,000-per-American payment) are sourced to the column. Hendrix’s quoted observations are sourced to the column. The Marx quotation from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” — that the work was meant “to demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part” — is sourced to Porter quoting Marx. The comparative cases (Putin, Xi, Papa Doc Duvalier, Somoza) are sourced to Porter’s column. No additional fact outside the substrate has been introduced.

Coverage gap. The precise methodology V-Dem uses to construct its state-ownership scale is not described in the source article beyond noting that the project “built its scale to track the share of economic activity under direct state control.” Whether the US’s 14-rank drop reflects a methodological re-weighting in 2025, a genuine shift in the underlying variable, or both cannot be determined from the package. The ranking’s robustness to V-Dem’s own methodological choices is therefore not assessable here.

Implication for the central question. Three weight regimes produce three orderings: under base-case weights (C2 highest at 0.25), D leads at 6.00 and the ordering is D > E > C > A > B; under a stated-rationale-heavy regime (C3 raised to 0.35, C2 lowered to 0.10), A leads by 0.58 over D and the ordering is A > D > C > B = E; under a comparative-case-heavy regime (C4 raised to 0.30, C3 lowered to 0.10), D still leads at 6.65 but C takes second and the ordering is D > C > B > E > A. Each regime is internally consistent with the substrate’s evidence: a reader who privileges the administration’s stated national-security framing will arrive at A; a reader who privileges the documented pattern of targeted stakes together with Porter’s Latin American comparators will arrive at D; a reader who privileges the comparative cases alone will arrive at a D > C > B > E > A ordering. The substrate does not adjudicate among these weight choices — the analytical exercise surfaces the choice but does not resolve it.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis
Scores competing options against several weighted criteria at once.