In January, this article series opened with a blunt question: Economic statecraft is back, but is America ready?

Driving the question, in part, was the fact that the United States had not yet articulated (at least overtly) a strategy for economic statecraft. This was despite widening recognition that nations were increasingly using economic tools like tariffs and sanctions to pursue strategic objectives. U.S. awareness was particularly elevated by the realization during COVID-19 that decades of Chinese market manipulation, predatory trade behaviors, and security vulnerabilities deployed against its markets had gone unanswered.

On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent fired a shot across the bow. He announced a framework for economic statecraft driven by “the disciplined use of America’s economic power in service of our sovereignty,” embracing Alexander Hamilton’s principle that every nation “ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.” The strategy, which Bessent delivered to the Economic Club of New York and outlined publicly in the Wall Street Journal, centered on five principles: economic security begins with national capacity; American openness will be matched by reciprocity; America will write the rules of the next economy; financial leadership is a central instrument of statecraft; and economic statecraft should serve the American people.

Bessent’s five principles are generally an amalgamation of bipartisan economic statecraft concepts pursued since at least 2011 (albeit a departure from 80-plus years of post-war, Bretton Woods-framed geoeconomics). They also underscore the difficulty of crafting a comprehensive economic strategy given very real tradeoffs between America’s economic exceptionalism and its national security goals. Tensions among the strategy’s principles are evident. For example, economic security derived from national capacity harkens to autarky, but American openness enabled by reciprocity points toward conditional engagement in an international trading system.

Despite its unproven state, Bessent and the executive branch have framed an overdue and much-needed strategy for economic statecraft. While the speech was a clarifying point for planners at Treasury, Commerce, the State Department, the Combatant Commands, and other agencies, the doctrine to follow — the guide for the strategy’s implementation — is yet to be developed and should be adopted in concert with ongoing practices and guidance, while holding true to national values, institutional norms, and an independent private sector. That will require engagement with lawmakers, industry, and academics to reconcile tensions, and so practitioners are productively mobilized to realize the strategy’s vision. While current efforts across the executive and legislative branches, industry, academia, and policy communities can serve as helpful guides, they are generally siloed and uncoordinated. Success therefore demands that doctrine be developed and orchestrated collaboratively across these communities.

Enabling elements include designating a “referee” for economic statecraft in the executive branch, a settled “home” for it in Congress, paradigm-shifting incentives for industry to partner with government, workforce investment, and evolution in academia. While many tradeoffs remain unresolved, these and future policy solutions will help leaders recognize and accept the risks required for meaningful change.

The Executive Branch

Bessent’s speech is the most senior entry in a rapid buildup of economic security policy activities across the executive branch this year.

In April, the Pentagon’s Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg formally established the Economic Defense Unit, a hub charged with fusing economic leverage and requirements into joint military planning and operations by developing requirements for economic competition activities. It joins the Office of Strategic Capital in a growing Pentagon ecosystem focused on gaining strategic advantage via economic leverage.

The analytic foundation for that pursuit is also underway. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s National Security Economic Theory program aims to put geoeconomics on a more quantitative and rigorous theoretical footing. A companion effort, the Anticipatory and Adaptive Anti-Money Laundering program, targets the machinery of illicit finance. For a discipline that lacks objective metrics and testable models due to its nascency, wargaming geoeconomics with rigor and intentionality is a necessity to build confidence in practice, policy, and process.

The work ahead requires putting the strategy on paper so bureaucracies can consider and ingest it into process and practice. Bureaucrats thrive on regulatory guidance, as it is their impetus for action or inaction (and thus Congressional oversight). Bessent’s five principles deserve similar treatment to what the National Defense Strategy does for the military instrument: a published economic security strategy nested within the national security strategy, with interagency doctrine and campaign plans following in turn.

Ongoing doctrinal work is ripe for adoption and then operationalization but it should be synchronized. The core task requires integrating economic considerations into both joint planning and the combatant commands, where commanders hold the day-to-day partner relationships upon which multilateral pressure campaigns depend. Success will require building requisite playbooks and wargames to give Washington options when a crisis arrives. To execute, the executive branch should establish an entity akin to the Economic Warfare Operations Capability with definitive authority to prioritize and act on offensive and defensive economic statecraft decisions. It should be informed by a joint public-private fused intelligence and analytics enterprise, in conjunction with domestic and foreign industry partners.

Congress

Congress is engaged, having recently pursued or passed various legislative initiatives, reports, and appropriations related to economic statecraft, to include the 2024 codification of the Office of Expanded Competition. In contrast, Congress did not include language authorizing the Economic Defense Unit in the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, despite notable bipartisan support. Passage this year is similarly uncertain, though the unit is still authorized to operate by Pentagon memo with $500 million in Congressional funding.

Legislative branch oversight fora like the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the House and Senate intelligence committees, and those overseeing commerce and foreign affairs, actively deliver proposals and recommendations on economic statecraft issues. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has especially proven itself as an active bipartisan forum focused on advancing U.S. economic competitive advantage.

Yet challenges remain as economic statecraft lacks a single defined path for legislation and oversight on the Hill. While the House Select Committee’s charter sanctions investigative authority, it does not grant legislative jurisdiction. Instead, its members work through other committees to advance legislation into law — not ideal given the magnitude and scope of the challenge and the competition for time and attention on busy legislative agendas.

All these activities under Congress’s charter — oversight, sunset clauses, reporting requirements, review and validation of policies, statutory latitude and guardrails on new authorities — grow trust in emerging doctrine, which, in turn, helps turn strategy into practice.

The codification of entities like the Office of Expanded Competition or the Economic Defense Unit by Congress elevate and establish interagency economic statecraft authorities that endure beyond administrations. More broadly, it helps establish a dedicated home for economic statecraft, whether via a dedicated committee or a coordinating body among House and Senate committees that oversee jurisdiction of economic security-related issues.

A settled home in Congress, whether via a dedicated committee or a coordinating body among House and Senate committees that oversee jurisdiction of economic security-related issues, would give Bessent’s strategy a durable legislative branch counterpart.

Industry

Over the last decade, industry has been forced to reconcile, often reluctantly, with its frontline role in contemporary economic statecraft.

Why the tension? Economic and political decisions once limited to local or regional impact now reverberate globally at unprecedented speed and scale. Once mundane corporate maneuvering from routine purchases to major mergers and acquisitions, capital investments, and manufacturing decisions, now translate to strategic leverage. The ability of the United States to apply economic pressure ultimately rests on the combination of individual chokepoints and production, finance, supply capacity, and capabilities wielded by corporate America.

A strong enduring U.S. strategic posture will require continued overhaul of how public and private sector actors collaborate domestically and abroad. Fusion of government and business intelligence is an enabling vehicle, required to inform board-level decision-making with statecraft implications while establishing doctrinal bona fides in both domains. Legal and ethics codes, like elements of the Federal Acquisition Regulation that define the statutory bounds of government and business interactions, should be reviewed and adjusted to ensure threats are meaningfully addressed jointly (and incentivized accordingly), while holding true to long-held societal values and free market norms.

Industry should expect clear signals of policy and intent from the government as boards and executive teams renew their approach to due diligence, especially those with significant exposure or involvement in markets inherently vital to national security. An open channel for continuous public-private dialogue, a clearinghouse to jointly mitigate or resolve unintended missteps, is in order to facilitate.

Private-public efforts like J.P. Morgan’s Security and Resilience Initiative, non-profit organizations like Business Executives for National Security, the Pentagon’s Business Operators for National Defense program, and purposeful guidance of capital toward national security-relevant sectors demonstrate progress on shifting culture and practice. But evolution with staying power in both domains is still required for enduring economic security.

While policymakers are expected to lead, industry is firmly in the driver’s seat. Much like the storied journey that led to an effective public-private approach to cyber security, the two sectors should come together to develop and deploy a doctrine to implement the nation’s strategy for economic statecraft.

Academia and Workforce

Just as economic statecraft lacks a home across government, the discipline lacks a settled home in academia, caught somewhere between economics, political science, security studies, and business. A ready workforce capable of navigating contemporary economic statecraft will require more intentional engagement and investment.

The tide is shifting. Institutions like the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy have long filled a gap in helping military leaders understand and plan for the impact of adversarial economic statecraft on the ability to execute military missions. Civilian programs like Texas A&M’s Economic Statecraft Program at the Bush School of Government are furthering intellectual rigor and academic programs. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s National Security Economic Theory program will contribute to both realms, civilian and military, in its pursuit to define a more rigorous scholarly field for contemporary quantitative geoeconomics.

Academics should embrace interdisciplinary education, collaboration, and shifting incentives to drive scale and structure. Universities can begin by formalizing curricula and credentials that prepare graduates for government and industry alike. The skills needed to staff a Treasury sanctions team will doubtless be transferable to corporate policy intelligence shops.

The workforce pipeline is its own front in the global competitive environment, with an incredibly long lead time. Every element of Bessent’s strategy, from enforcement to analysis to campaign planning, will require people educated and trained to carry it out.

The Policy Community

The defense policy community has advanced doctrinal approaches and proposed frameworks for economic statecraft. As with the other communities, their work should be digested and analyzed by public and private sector leaders for integration into ongoing operations and contingency planning.

Two major works appeared this spring. Emily Kilcrease’s Hit It with Your Best Shot: An American Doctrine of Economic Pressure distills 20 historical cases of American economic pressure into nine doctrinal principles, anchored by three theories campaigns should articulate in advance: a theory of victory, a theory of failure, and a theory of restraint. Elaine Dezenski and Josh Birenbaum’s Gameplan for American Economic Security proposes principles the United States should defend with its economic power and an “Economic Pentagon” to coordinate the effort. Likewise, the Potomac Institute’s 2025 Economic Statecraft Summit Report recommended a federal convening authority, an analytic enterprise, and oversight mechanisms to enable elements proposed in previous sections of this article.

Bessent’s June remarks now sit alongside these proposals, among others. Despite differences, there is overlap between mutual ideas of centralized orchestration, anticipatory planning, and disciplined practice as necessary doctrinal tenets. The yet-to-be-named entity should next translate that convergence into references and tools for practitioners’ use — operational handbooks, metrics of success, and wargame designs — for the interagency to exercise with and learn from alongside private sector partners.

Conclusion

U.S. adversaries and friends are carrying out their own economic statecraft strategies. China in particular is well-versed at waging economic war through supply chain coercion, intellectual property theft, cyber attacks, boardroom chess, and manufacturing base mastery. Its successes means the U.S. government and its public and private sector partners, at home and abroad, must act quickly.

The War by Other Ledgers series elevated what should be acted upon, both in practice and concept. Across the federal institutional architecture, authorities and decision-makers remain decentralized. Fused intelligence will close seams across public and private sector actors and better focus improvised operations by the Pentagon and other federal entities in the absence of a strategy and clear doctrinal framework. Corporate leaders are learning to assess risk given new geoeconomic realities while grappling with how to grow and develop a workforce for today and tomorrow. All point to the same condition: Siloes of excellence across the government and private sector are working ad hoc and disparately on economic security and will benefit from the connective tissue of a holistic national strategy and doctrine for economic statecraft.

Wholesale agreement on any administration’s approach to policy is perpetually elusive. Bessent’s strategy to economic statecraft strategy is no exception and will need to overcome critics of its principles and practice. Regardless, there is undeniable momentum for change across the stakeholder communities that should be translated into action.

Bessent’s strategy offers an outline for a playbook yet to be drafted. The ledgers are open. Will the United States do what is necessary to balance them?

Tim Welter, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, where he started and leads the Global Competition Project. Leveraging experience from Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, industry, and academia, his research is primarily focused on national security policy development and implementation, and economic statecraft.

Image: Karen Nutini via Wikimedia Commons.