In 1997 the Indonesian economy was devastated by a financial crisis, sending its currency plummeting and exposing President Suharto’s corrupt and shortsighted policies. The meltdown turned out to be the nail in the coffin for the aging dictator, whose hold on power had lasted for 30 years.

What was perhaps more interesting than the resignation of this beleaguered president was the response made hundreds of miles away. On Jim Lehrer’s The News Hour, US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin remarked, “We are in a new world…It’s a world of enormous opportunities, but it also has new risks…[Recovery] is obviously very much in the interest of the Indonesian people, but it’s also very, very much in our economic and national security interest.”

The Asian financial crisis crystallized a notion that has become integral to the policymaking processes of contemporary economic and national security bodies: that globalization of financial markets has made it impossible for countries to fully protect their national security interests without also considering economic factors. In light of this fact, this symposium seeks to investigate how economic and national security policymaking can and should be considered in tandem. Each contribution presents and explains one or more national security considerations that might be approached, at least in part, from an economic perspective.

The interrelationship of economics and national security manifests itself on several levels. Our first author, Michael Mastanduno, examines this interplay on a geopolitical scale, using an economic approach to explain the increasingly tense power rivalry between China and the United States. The symposium then proceeds to analyze a number of security policies that incorporate economic considerations. Perhaps the most obvious of these is economic sanctions: George Lopez investigates sanctions within the context of the US-UN relationship, while William Kaempfer and Anton Lowenberg defend “smart sanctions.” Carol Adelman takes the novel approach of examining the security implications of foreign aid, a policy that is conventionally considered to be primarily economic. Oil also has significant repercussions for many countries’ national security agendas, and in his article, Robert Mabro explains some of these dynamics, debunking the notion that the West is in danger of being the target of an oil weapon. Finally, the symposium concludes with an article by Robert Kimmitt, the current US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, who explains the importance of maintaining open economies while protecting national security concerns.

As China gains increasing power, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia use their energy resources as political leverage, and policymakers consider strengthened sanctions policies, economics will only play an increasingly prominent role in national security considerations. As Robert Rubin pointed out, “[T]he world has never dealt with quite these kinds of problems.” And as this symposium seeks to demonstrate, new problems require a new framework—one that incorporates economic considerations in national security policymaking in order to produce more effective policies in a changing world.