Donald Trump is an activist, reform-minded president.

No institution is safe from his scrutiny, but entering his final years, we should consider the global challenges confronting the nation no matter who occupies the White House.

Regardless of its origins, climate change is here.

Whether Americans employ fossil fuels or sunshine and wind, US. policy can’t appreciably stem a warmer planet. China keeps building coal fired plants.

Rising temperatures instigate more-intense, rapidly escalating storms, droughts and wildfires, rendering farms less productive, and driving large migrations within, among and from developing nations.

Securing our borders against unwanted immigration, fortifying coastal and river cities and smarter land-use policies are essential.

Rising insurance costs, just like high interest rates, make home ownership less attainable. Agriculture in significant parts of the Southwest is becoming less practical. And building near California’s forests and many eastern shoreline areas is irresponsible.

President Putin aims to reassert Russian control of Eastern Europe, and President Xi Jinping is preparing China’s military to take Taiwan as early as 2027.

American high tech runs on Nvidia chips fabricated in Taiwan with machinery from the Netherlands.

Whether the Taiwanese and Europeans deserve our protection is irrelevant, their security is our security.

Artificial Intelligence and robots are displacing workers, but we’d be foolish to block their progress.

If we don’t lead in AI, China will, and the military applications for AI make that existential.

Tariffs and industrial policies can reshore the automotive, rare earths, pharmaceutical and other supply chains, but those won’t generate enough employment to create a nostalgic rendering of 1950s prosperity.

American technology companies, like Nvidia, Alphabet and Anthropic require global markets to generate the profits and investments necessary to succeed.

That makes globalization an imperative, not a choice. If America doesn’t constructively engage in international commerce, China will dominate.

Since 2007, the U.S. fertility rate has been declining, and that is coming to bear in labor markets.

During the first Trump and Biden presidencies the U.S. economy grew 2.5% a year—well above what economists considerable sustainable.

In the summer of 2023, unemployment was 3.7%. Yet exceptional growth continued, and the economy added 174,000 jobs a month.

Illegal immigrants supplemented the 90,000 new workers that indigenous population growth and Biden-era legal immigration policies could sustain.

Indigenous population growth can provide only about 24,000 new workers a month.

Immigrants fill about one-fifth of STEM positions and over two-fifths of doctoral level science and engineering roles.

Hence, we need about one million carefully selected legal immigrant workers annually—that’s more than President Trump’s policies permit.

All this gives us our to-do list.

We need to incentivize our states to harden our cities and pursue more responsible land use policies.

States meddling in homeowners’ insurance markets encourages irresponsible development in vulnerable locations and won’t stop the floods and fires. That needs to stop.

It’s futile to quarrel over electric vs internal combustion vehicles, natural gas vs. wind power and free trade vs industrial policies. We need to reorder our priorities and influence those of western allies.

We need to spend at least 5% of GDP not the current 3.4% on defense.

Canada, our European allies and Japan are spending more on hardware, but they need to build larger fleets and standing armies. That’s needed to face down Russian and Chinese expansionist ambitions in the Arctic, in Eastern Europe and the Straits of Taiwan, Sea of Japan and South Pacific.

We need a carefully reordered immigration policy to admit workers in the skill areas required to accomplish 2.5% to 3.5% GDP growth.

That’s essential for creating enough new businesses to absorb workers displaced by AI in established firms.

That’s possible with AI properly deployed to boost productivity.

We need to shape up higher education to place a much greater emphasis on the historic mission of state universities—educate more American technologists, scientists and engineers and fewer social activists.

The free trade order of the pre-Trump years was ruinous, but so are tariffs scaled up to the current 17%.

We need to audit our supply chains to root out dependencies on China and less reliable friends like India, relocate those activities to safer places and keep the tariffs high on them.

President Trump’s rare earth mineral’s initiatives are a good start, but we need equally aggressive approaches for pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and whatever else we can’t do without in a crisis.

We should negotiate down tariffs with Canada, Europe and Japan with the understanding that their barriers to our technology exports must go.

The UK, France and several other nations impose digital services taxes that are burdensome tariffs on our high-tech services. No deals that tolerate DSTs.

We shouldn’t return to promiscuous immigration and trade policies, but hard-headed, pragmatic internationalism is in order.

Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.