Richard C. Holbrooke Lecture

Europe in an Age of Economic Warfare

Economic openness has long been Europe’s primary path to wealth and power. More recently, it has become a source of vulnerability. Shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that global economic networks of information, money, and production were more brittle and centralized than many assumed. In this talk, Abraham L. Newman notes that the United States and China have begun to manipulate these vulnerabilities, inflicting costs on adversaries as a tool of foreign policy; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its energy war has made this only more apparent. Newman explains how the chokepoints of the global economy have become the battlefield upon which interstate tensions play out—and what Europe can do to mitigate its vulnerabilities.