Economic & Financial Statecraft Program
In this era of unprecedented global interdependence, international economic and financial (E&F) relations have become an integral part of every nation’s foreign policy. While the world’s interconnectedness has produced tremendous gains in economic prosperity, it has also created a complex array of security threats and vulnerabilities in state to state relations. Some of these threats emanate from the use of economic and financial statecraft by adversaries. For example, they can take the form of seemingly commercial business endeavors, often carried out by state-controlled enterprises but designed to compromise a targeted country.
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These kinds of transactions and projects, business that has traditionally been viewed as benign and even desirable, now carry strategic implications that PSSI’s Economic & Financial Statecraft Program intends to help illuminate. Specifically, this Program aims to improve national and economic security through cutting-edge empirical research into Chinese and Russian transactions and entities implicated by this area of risk and by working to build consensus around new E&F principles within the Western security community.
The principal goals of PSSI’s E&F Statecraft Program are to prevent the state-managed economies of our adversaries from using – and abusing – the open international financial and trading systems for malevolent purposes. It also seeks to ensure that the U.S. and other Western capital markets are no longer exploited by China and Russia – to the tune of trillions of dollars over the past several years – to fund their corporate "bad actors" and activities inimical to vital U.S. and Western security interests and human rights values.
Countering Chinese and Russian efforts to convert economic and financial dependencies on the part of other nations into strategic and political leverage, while maintaining the West’s commitment in the E&F portfolio to democracy, high ethical standards, rigorous accountability, sound corporate governance and intensified security-minded diligence regarding securities transactions are emerging as key challenges of our time. PSSI’s E&F Statecraft Program exists to aid and equip Western policy-makers to meet these emerging challenges head on.