LCRS are good for the global economy---revitalizes businesses and boosts US global competition---solves green trade wars.

The work of revitalizing the long-struggling heartland industrial regions isn’t just a U.S. project, though; rather, it’s of vital importance on both sides of the Atlantic.

As the United States makes unprecedented investments in its industrial heartland, the U.K. government has pursued its own agenda to “level up” the country’s left-behind regions. The European Union has acted similarly, seeking to improve its regional structural adjustment and cohesion policies, whose main task is to support the economic well-being of regions whose development is lagging behind. The OECD is also developing road maps and inventories on successful regional transformations to inform policy decisions in this area.

Policymakers in both Europe and North America have come to understand that, in the words of economic geography professor Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, the “revenge of the places that don’t matter” has political consequences—not just locally, but for their countries’ domestic political institutions, international relations, and place in the global economy. By supporting firms, university spinouts, and new industries in heartland areas through the IRA and related programs, the United States believes it can help rebuild local economies and possibly reduce the likelihood of political disaffection. This in turn will make the United States a better partner in the global economy and the institutions that govern it. Much the same could be said about government programs to assist post-industrial communities in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Hungary, or Poland.

As such, debates over whether the IRA constitutes a new protectionism obscure a vital point: The economic revival of left-behind places is not a zero-sum game among allied nations. Neither is the commitment to developing new green industries and the supply chains and jobs that come with them. There is a path forward whereby the collective of democracies gets stronger both economically and politically by building new industries in underperforming regions and by working together as partners with shared democratic values. To succeed in revitalizing the industrial heartlands, the United States and Europe cannot work on the problem alone and at the expense of the other. Rather, a cooperative, transatlantic approach is essential for long-term success.

The goal here for the United States and Europe should not be to outrun each other, but to become jointly independent from supply chains originating in undemocratic regimes—and, in the process, to establish the transatlantic economic leadership of the global green transition. Viewed through this lens, and not the more typical frame of zero-sum conflict and protectionism, Europe and the United States can and should work together to make this a reality. Ironically, with its tit-for-tat response to the IRA, the European Union has inadvertently taken a first step toward the completion of a transatlantic space in which green investment in heartland manufacturing regions is prioritized.