February 06, 2025

A World Safe for Prosperity

How America Can Foster Economic Security

By: Geoffrey Gertz and Emily Kilcrease

While the Trump administration has ignited a series of trade conflicts during its first weeks in office, it has also signaled an interest in launching negotiations for new trade deals. In an article for Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Gertz and Emily Kilcrease provide a blueprint for rethinking U.S. trade policy to center the economic security priorities that governments are most concerned with today. Working with close allies and partners, the Trump administration should pursue new economic security agreements that combine aligning defensive tools such as export controls and investment restrictions with efforts to lower trade barriers in key sectors. This approach will empower the United States to more effectively address the economic and security risks from China and other adversaries and lay the foundation for a long overdue renewal of the global economic system.

U.S. President Donald Trump jolted the global economy this past weekend when he announced sweeping tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico, the United States’ three largest trading partners. Although most of these levies were ultimately delayed after a frantic few days of negotiations, Trump’s actions confirmed what his campaign rhetoric had led observers to believe: that tariffs, whether implemented or threatened, will be central to his foreign policy. The moves sparked outcry from industry leaders and economists, who cited the risks of crippled supply chains and higher prices for American consumers and companies. It was a strategic misstep from an administration faced with the opportunity to reshape the rules of the global economy to benefit U.S. national security.

The global economic order, comprising multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization as well as regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements, has grown stagnant and no longer advances the United States’ most important concerns. Economic security—the idea that the government should more assertively intervene in the world economy to improve resilience and address national security risks—has emerged as perhaps the central objective of U.S. international economic policy. The United States and other countries increasingly fear that economic interdependence can make them vulnerable to adversaries and susceptible to wider shocks; Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, put this weakness into stark relief. Protecting the U.S. economy from these dangers has become an area of bipartisan consensus in Washington, as evident in a suite of policies enacted during the past two administrations, including sanctions, supply chain reviews, sweeping export controls, and restrictions on both outbound investments and flows of sensitive data.

Read the full article from Foreign Affairs Magazine.

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