CNAS Insights | Why the United States Needs Economic Coercion Doctrine

Economic tools now sit at the center of U.S. global competition. Sanctions, export controls, investment restrictions, and financial measures are employed with a frequency and scale that reflect durable geopolitical rivalry rather than episodic crisis response. Like military campaigns, these instruments shape the operational environment and influence states and markets over time, generating both immediate leverage and longer-term strategic effects. Yet despite economic coercion’s growing importance, the United States lacks a shared framework among agencies, policymakers, and advisors for how it should be employed systematically to achieve near-term objectives while shaping the international environment over time.

A military doctrinal approach can help bridge this gap between tactics and strategy. Doctrine does not direct or mandate action, but it could inform decisions by providing a shared way of thinking across the U.S. government about how economic coercion is applied in support of political objectives. By clarifying purpose, establishing common language, distinguishing levels of application, and highlighting interactions across tools and contexts, doctrine helps ensure that no critical element is overlooked. Properly applied, it transforms ad hoc economic pressure into a disciplined instrument of coercion capable of generating both immediate leverage and enduring influence. This commentary focuses primarily on clarifying purpose and distinguishing levels of application since these represent the most pressing shifts needed for a more strategic approach to the U.S. economic toolkit.

Doctrine as Strategic Discipline

U.S. joint doctrine defines doctrine as the fundamental principles guiding the employment of military forces in support of national objectives, underscoring that doctrine does not constrain judgement but rather informs it. For nonmilitary audiences, doctrine is best understood as a shared way of thinking: It does not dictate specific actions or outcomes, but structures how problems are framed, what questions are asked, and which risks must be considered before decisions are made.

In practice, doctrine functions less like a rulebook and more like a planning lens—ensuring attention to objectives, escalation dynamics, coordination, and unintended consequences. A useful historical analogy is Operation DESERT STORM, where airpower doctrine did not prescribe specific targets or tactics but clarified how military pressure was expected to translate into strategic and political effects. By providing a shared theory of cause and effect (linking sequencing, signaling, and cumulative pressure to desired outcomes), doctrine disciplined decision-making and aligned expectations without constraining operational choice.

Much like military measures, coercive economic tools are often deployed as instruments of urgency, driven by immediate geopolitical pressure. However, objectives are frequently ambiguous, theories of influence underdeveloped, and criteria for success or termination poorly articulated. Measures persist while targets adapt and allies absorb unintended costs. CNAS research on the effectiveness of sanctions has repeatedly highlighted this pattern, warning that overuse and poorly defined objectives can reduce leverage and incentivize evasion over compliance. The post-2014 Russia sanctions regime illustrates this gap. While early measures imposed meaningful costs, the absence of a clearly articulated escalation logic or termination criteria meant that persistence substituted for strategy, allowing pressure to continue even as Moscow adapted, diversified, and insulated key sectors, blunting leverage over time.

A doctrinal framework encourages clarity at the outset. Before imposing measures, policymakers would clearly articulate the political objective, the mechanism through which economic pressure is expected to shape behavior (the theory of victory), and the conditions for escalation, adjustment, or relief. Like military planning, this approach treats economic instruments as elements of a larger operational and strategic design, rather than isolated tactical actions.

Conceptual Clarity for Senior Leaders

Doctrine provides senior leaders with shared concepts that allow them to reason through complex problems without becoming immersed in technical detail. In military practice, concepts such as shaping, deterrence, and compellence help leaders assess risk, timelines, and tradeoffs. Coercive economic instruments benefit from similar clarity. Shaping structures markets and institutions to reduce vulnerability, deterrence relies on credible threats to prevent undesirable actions, and compellence uses pressure or coercion to force an adversary to change course once they have already begun a harmful action.

CNAS research emphasizes that against peer competitors, shaping and deterrence are often more sustainable than maximalist compellence, particularly in technology and energy domains where long-term system resilience matters as much as near-term leverage. Doctrine helps make these tradeoffs explicit and contestable at the political level rather than implicit or reactive. The debate over U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors to China illustrates this distinction. CNAS analysis argues that when such controls are treated as tools of long-term shaping and deterrence rather than short-term compellence, they clarify objectives, align expectations across agencies and allies, and reduce the risk that tactical restrictions are mistaken for strategic success.

Levels of Application: Strategy, Operations, and Tactics

Doctrine’s most important contribution is its differentiation across levels of application. Military theory distinguishes tactical, operational, and strategic levels to prevent conflating disparate activity with progress toward political objectives. For instance, a tactical airstrike may destroy a bridge to limit military maneuver, an operational campaign may target enemy supply lines to limit sustainment, and a strategic effort may shape the broader war to compel a negotiated settlement. Economic coercion currently lacks this structure.

At the strategic level, doctrine would discipline how economic instruments are employed to advance political objectives, rather than defining those objectives themselves. Strategy would concern how economic pressure shapes the long-term international system: alliances, dollar-based financial power, energy and technology market resilience, and norms governing economic competition. Strategy is the pursuit of continuing advantage. Strategic thinking asks whether repeated measures would strengthen U.S. power over time or erode the very structures that support it.

At the operational level, doctrine would guide how economic tools are integrated with diplomacy, information, and military instruments over time. Economic coercion is rarely employed in isolation; it is typically paired with diplomatic signaling, information operations, and military posture. This includes sequencing measures, coordinating with allies, managing escalation, and assessing cumulative effects (what military doctrine calls campaigning and operational art). CNAS research highlights operational gaps as a central weakness in U.S. economic coercion, where tools are often applied tactically without an overarching campaign linking actions to strategic outcomes.

At the tactical level, doctrine would inform disciplined execution of specific actions, such as sanctions designations, export controls, licensing regimes, and financial restrictions, while ensuring they support a coherent operational concept. Importantly, individual tools would remain tactical and on their own do not constitute strategy.

Clarifying levels of application encourages continually asking: Are these actions contributing to a coherent economic campaign, or are they reactive responses to immediate pressure? Without this distinction, economic coercion risks becoming a series of disconnected actions rather than a campaign designed to shape behavior and systems over time.

Discipline Without Rigidity

Doctrine does not eliminate uncertainty or risk; rather, it exists because competition involves friction, adaptation, and unintended consequences. Doctrine for economic instruments would not prevent escalation or failure, but it would impose discipline, prompting explicit consideration of second- and third-order effects, alliance exposure, and systemic fragility. Unconstrained coercion can erode the foundations of U.S. power; doctrine would ensure these risks are weighed alongside immediate geopolitical pressures.

Conclusion

The United States possesses formidable economic power but lacks a doctrinal framework for its coercive use. Military doctrine offers a proven model for how coercive instruments can be employed coherently, purposefully, and sustainably. By clarifying objectives, distinguishing levels of application, and providing shared concepts for both policymakers and the broader economic-policy community, doctrine can transform economic coercion from episodic action into strategic campaigning. In an era where economic pressure increasingly shapes geopolitical outcomes, doctrinal discipline ensures that economic force serves enduring political ends rather than tactical impulse.

Lt Col Mary Hossier is a senior military fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a U.S. Air Force force support officer, and a military strategist.