For decades, America ran the most generous open API the world has ever seen.

Free trade agreements. Open borders for goods. Most Favored Nation status handed out like developer keys. The pitch was simple: let anyone plug into the American economic engine, send us your exports, access our consumer market, and the rising tide of efficiency will lift all boats.

It was the economic equivalent of a tech company launching a free, unlimited API and telling the world: build on us.

And build they did. China became the world’s factory floor. Mexico became the nearshore assembly line. American companies moved upstream into design, IP, and brand while outsourcing the actual making of things to whoever could do it cheapest.

If you’ve spent any time in tech, you’ve seen this movie before.

The Free Tier Is Over

Remember when APIs were free? Google Maps, Twitter, Facebook. They flung open their platforms with zero restrictions. Third-party developers flooded in and built entire businesses on top of them. The platforms got distribution and network effects. Everyone won.

I would know. We ran this exact playbook at Buddy Media, building on Facebook, and again at Troops.ai.

building on Slack. It worked incredibly well. Both companies were acquired. But eventually, Facebook and Slack looked at what we’d built and realized they were giving away the store. They natively integrated our killer features into their own platforms. The open API giveth, and the open API taketh away.

Then came the pricing pages. Twitter killed its free API and started charging. Google Maps jacked up rates overnight and thousands of startups scrambled to rearchitect. OpenAI and every major LLM provider now charge per token, metering every single request that touches their infrastructure. What was once free became a line item, then a serious expense, then a strategic bottleneck.

That’s a tariff. Dressed up in developer docs instead of trade policy, but the mechanism is identical. You built on our platform for free while we were growing. Now we’re charging because we realize the value of what we’ve been giving away.

@gokulr talked about this strategy playing out at Facebook and Google. The result? They are two of the very best companies in the world. And there’s a graveyard of startups to show for it.

Look at U.S. trade policy and tell me it’s not the same pattern. Tariffs on Chinese goods. Reshoring incentives through the CHIPS Act. Restrictions on technology exports. Universal baseline tariffs floated every few months.

The message is the same one every maturing platform eventually sends: you’ve been accessing our infrastructure for free, and that era is over.

@howardlutnick recently delivered this very message at Davos.

Outsourcing Your Leverage

In tech, the open API era gave way to vertical integration. The companies that actually won didn’t just build platforms for others to plug into. They owned the full stack. Apple designs its own chips. Tesla manufactures its own batteries. Amazon runs the logistics, the cloud, and increasingly makes the products it sells.

The lesson is straightforward: when you outsource everything, you outsource your leverage. Open systems are great for growth. They’re terrible for defensibility.

America is learning this now, and the stakes are a lot higher than a startup losing access to an API.

When you outsource your manufacturing base to a geopolitical rival, you don’t just create a supply chain dependency. You create a military vulnerability. The same country making your consumer electronics makes components that go into defense systems. The same rare earth minerals that power your iPhone power your fighter jets. If the relationship deteriorates and the API gets shut off, you’re not dealing with empty shelves at Walmart. You’re dealing with a compromised ability to build the weapons your military needs to function.

This is why the U.S. is now backing American companies to acquire mineral mines in the Congo, competing directly with China’s decades-long head start locking up critical mineral supply chains across Africa. It’s full stack integration at a national level. You can’t just design the chip or assemble the product. You need to own the mine that produces the cobalt and lithium that make any of it possible in the first place.

Apple started designing its own silicon instead of buying from Intel. America is starting to secure its own minerals instead of buying from China. Same logic, wildly different consequences if you get it wrong. Apple ships a slower laptop. America loses the ability to defend itself.

The Stack Is the Strategy

The shift has real costs. Rate-limited APIs slow innovation at the edges. Tariffs raise consumer prices. Vertical integration is expensive and operationally brutal. There’s a reason companies outsourced in the first place, and there’s a reason countries did too.

But the calculus has changed. The question isn’t “what’s the most efficient way to produce things?” anymore. It’s “what’s the most resilient way to produce things, and who captures the value when things get tense?” This is especially true for strategically important categories like AI, weapons, defense, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare.

Tech learned this lesson already. The most valuable companies in the world aren’t the ones with the most open platforms. They’re the ones that control the critical and most valuable layers of their own stack.

America is running the same playbook at nation-state scale. The API is closing. The free tier is gone. And the winners in the next era, in both tech and geopolitics, will be the ones who own their stack from the mine to the microchip.