by Jordan B. Rickards
At its core, conservatism is rooted in a profound understanding of fragility. It recognizes that the most important elements of a functioning society — its institutions, its culture, its alliances, its economy, even the families and personal relationships of its people — are not easily built, and once broken, are difficult, sometimes impossible, to restore. These things require patience, care, and humility to maintain. They take generations to establish and only moments to unravel.
America’s resilience has never come from reckless reinvention but from deliberate preservation. We have endured because we have chosen to conserve — our constitutional order, our cultural norms, our global relationships, and our free-market system. This instinct to preserve what works, rather than to tear it down in pursuit of ideological purity or political gain, is what has set us apart. It’s what has allowed us to weather crises, to rebuild after failures, and to pass something stable and meaningful to the next generation.
That’s why it’s so troubling to watch the current administration gamble with the very foundations of global stability. The casual threats of economic decoupling, trade wars, and protectionist tariffs reflect a dangerous ignorance of just how delicate these systems really are. There’s an implicit assumption that we can turn off the global economy and simply flip the switch back on when we’re ready. But that’s not how complex systems work—especially not when those systems involve sovereign nations with their own interests, their own timelines, and their own red lines.
Once trust is broken in international trade, it is not easily repaired. Once alliances are strained, they do not snap back into place. And once global markets adjust to uncertainty, the consequences are felt in ways that can’t be fully predicted or easily contained. The result isn’t just economic instability—it’s geopolitical instability. Trade routes support political alliances. Supply chains support civil order. Economic strength undergirds military readiness. When one of these things falters, the others are never far behind.
Today it’s retirement savings disappearing; tomorrow it could be baby formula, insulin, or bread. The slide from economic strain to societal crisis can happen faster than we think.
Conservatism offers an antidote to this kind of chaos. It is a philosophy of stewardship, not disruption. And if we’ve forgotten how delicate our systems really are, we need only look back a few years to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Supermarket shelves were emptied. Panic buying set in. Even basic goods like toilet paper became scarce. That was just a small taste of what disruption looks like in a hyper-connected world.
And yet, today, we are willfully courting a much larger disruption. We have effectively severed trade with our largest supplier — China — and distanced ourselves from much of the rest of the world. All of this has been done in the name of “strength” and “independence,” yet the effect has been to make us more vulnerable than ever. We now find ourselves exposed to precisely the kind of shocks we claim to be insulating against.
This isn’t conservative. It’s reckless. True conservatism doesn’t chase strength through isolation or bravado. It builds strength through stability, reliability, and the quiet, disciplined work of protecting what matters most. In a world that is more interconnected and more volatile than ever, we abandon those principles at our peril.
