The Political Economy of National Security: Perspectives from the United States, Japan, Korea, and China

Domestic politics impinges on the capacity of the United States to exercise leadership in the Indo-Pacific, visible in the inability of either political party to follow through on the Trans-Pacific Partnership up through the difficulties the Biden administration faced at the 2023 APEC summit over the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.2 At the same time, “security” has been invoked in support of trad. [...] The second theme that runs through all four papers is what Farrell and Newman have called the weaponization of interdependence.3 This agenda is wide-ranging, and in the United States has taken a variety of forms: from the use of trade policy instruments to generate leverage—most notably in the Trump administration’s trade war—through the increasing attachment to sanctions as a foreign policy tool.. [...] The possibility that strategic competition will generate economic races-to-the- bottom segues naturally to the final cluster of issues where economics and security intersect: the role played by international and regional organizations and the effort to craft rules of the road. [...] These include efforts on the part of the United States to secure greater inward investment in the semiconductor industry in the early Biden administration and its more systematic pursuit of industrial policy in the IRA 18 | Korea Policy 2023 and CHIPS Act. [...] 467, May 2020, periphery_diplomacy_implications_for_peace_and_security_in_asia-sr.pdf; For evidence of the continuing emphasis given to the concept, which celebrates the tenth anniversary of Xi Jinping’s introduction of the concept, see Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States, “Outlook on China’s Foreig.