Geoeconomics Revisited

Speaker: Dr. Edward Luttwak (Strategist & Historian)

Date: 8 April 2021

Speaker Session Summary

SMA hosted a speaker series session with Dr. Edward Luttwak (Strategist & Historian) as a part of its SMA INSS/PRISM Speaker Series.

During his brief opening remarks, Dr. Luttwak stated that China is one of only a few countries who truly practice geoeconomics, which he defined as a mixture of investments, production, trade, and technological research and development. China has only recently begun practicing all facets of geoeconomics, however.

It is not necessary for a country to defeat its adversaries through its military capabilities when that country practices geoeconomics, Dr. Luttwak argued. Instead, it can apply economic pressure by outproducing or investing in an industry that a smaller or less developed country relies upon. Another form of offensive geoeconomics is when a country encourages companies located in an adversarial country to export to them in order to increase those companies’ dependence on their own domestic market. By doing this, the importing country can suddenly cut off foreign companies from their main market, which will, in turn, increase political pressure on those companies’ governments. Examples of this strategy can be found within the Australian wine industry, which is reliant on China, and China’s dependence on ARM computer processors made in the US. On the other hand, this geoeconomical tactic also increases the importing country’s vulnerability to being potentially shut off from an important resource. Therefore, increasing the amount of money spent on research and development to maintain technological advantages is also a crucial tool for geoeconomics, Dr. Luttwak emphasized.

Speaker Session Recording

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Briefing Materials

Biography:

Dr. Edward N. Luttwak is a Distinguished Adjunct Fellow at The Marathon Initiative, a policy initiative focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. Previously, Luttwak has served on U.S. presidential transition teams, testified before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, and has advised the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. National Security Council, the White House Chief of Staff, and several allied governments, including Japan. Luttwak is the author of several books, including Coup d’état: A Practical Handbook (Penguin, 1968), which derived from his work as a London-based oil consultant; The Israeli Army, with Dan Horowitz (Allen Lane, 1975); The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), which derived from his Ph. D. dissertation; The Pentagon and The Art Of War: The Question Of Military Reform (Simon & Schuster, 1985), which was a cited source of the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act; Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), which is widely assigned in professional military education programs; Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy (HarperCollins, 1999), which introduced the concept of geo-economics, the logic of war in the grammar of commerce; The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); and, most recently, The Rise of China vs. The Logic of Strategy (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), which derived from a study for the U.S. Government. His books have been published in Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Mongolian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese Lisbon, Portuguese São Paulo, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Luttwak was born in Arad, Romania and raised in Italy and England. He is an alumnus of London School of Economics (B.S.) and Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D.). From 1967-1972, he was a volunteer and then military contractor for the Israel Defense Forces. In 1975, he was retained as a strategic consultant to the immediate Office of the Secretary of Defense under James R. Schlesinger. Luttwak was made a U.S. citizen by Act of Congress, H.R. 2550, 95th Congress, January 26, 1977. Luttwak established and supervises a conservation ranch in the Bolivian Amazon. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland (https://www.themarathoninitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/EDWARD_LUTTWAK_BIO_TMI.pdf).

The SMA INSS/PRISM Speaker Series description and list of the other sessions in this series can be downloaded here.