S5 Ep31: Director's Cut: Balancing free trade with national security interests

In this episode of Director's Cut, Stephanie Segal of
CSIS joins Bruegel's Guntram Wolff and Maria Demertzis for a
conversation about the tension between free trade and national
security issues, and the emerging threats to
multilateralism.


In a changing geopolitical order, with China on the rise, the
linkage of economic and national security is more evident than
ever. The boom of disruptive new technologies is accompanied by
increasingly country-centric political tendencies, and the more
and more antagonistic stance of the US towards the EU and China.
Taken together, a unique setting emerges for dealing with
pressing issues in economic security.


Stephanie Segal, deputy director and senior fellow of the CSIS
Simon Chair in Political Economy, joins Bruegel director Guntram
Wolff and deputy director Maria Demertzis to discuss the looming
challenges.


They sketch out the approach taken by key global players to
balance the continuous benefits of free trade against the need to
safeguard national security interests. The new trade-restrictive
measures – such as increased scrutiny over foreign direct
investment – have obvious consequences for global economic growth
and the rules-based multilateral trading system. The discussants
elaborate on the importance of preserving multilateralism, and
the role of international organisations in the process. 


For further reading, we recommend an opinion piece by Jean
Pisani-Ferry where he portrays the current international economic
and geopolitical order as increasingly reminiscent of chess, as
well as an economic blogs review by Bowen Call on the impact of
recent US mid-term elections on the world economy.