Economic Statecraft

"I cried happy tears when I discovered this book, realising that I had a kindred spirit out there who many years earlier had gotten to a lot of the answers I had only just begun coming around to. He really does a wonderful service in laying out the beginnings of a conceptual framework, even as he sticks true to his billing of remaining avowedly theoretical. Where he does give examples, it’s primarily on sanctions and trade. He doesn’t aim to offer an inventory of these tools, but he has done a lot of the hard thinking that remains evergreen, and that Bob and I were able to stand on. But, as with most things that happened in 1985, the world today looks more different than not: some of the central theatres of foreign policy today, like the cyber domain, didn’t even exist as Baldwin was writing. Others, even if they’re as old as diplomacy itself, like trade and economic assistance, have new players like sovereign wealth funds. Baldwin’s great service was also to identify what economic statecraft isn’t. There’s a tendency to lump a lot of these themes in with international political economy—conflating things that are more or less trade for trade’s sake as geoeconomics—rather than judging these efforts by geopolitical (as opposed to their economic) outcomes. Not really. Mostly I’m sad that he didn’t write an updated volume to this. He’s still around, and I’ve corresponded with him a bit. I would love to hear his views on what it is he thinks we’re seeing after the so-called ‘end of history.’ Does he think, as I do, that we’ve ingested our own neoliberal medicine, and begun to believe our own lines—on global markets as an apolitical sphere, on the Bretton Woods institutions as above the realm of geopolitics—a little more than we should?"