One of the cornerstones of the National Security Strategy of United States in the 2017 version it was the statement that “economic security is national security".
In the years since, this identity has acquired ever greater relevance for Washington, especially in light of the critical challenges to the economic order posed by disruptions to supply chains caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war in Iran, and more generally by the spread of so-called disruptive technologies.
Thus, in its 2025 reworking, the National Security Strategy emphasized the concept expressed eight years earlier, arguing that “economic security is fundamental to national security.”
The latest formulation of the U.S. strategy for addressing economic security challenges in terms of addressing national security problems came from a speech that Treasury Secretary Donald Trump, Scott Bessent, he spoke at the Economic Club of New York on June 23.
On this occasion, Bessent outlined the priorities of the Trump administration's “economic statecraft”, that is, he indicated the objectives that Washington intends to achieve through the use of one's economic power, detached from market logic, without resorting to the use of military force: supply chain security (particularly for strategic sectors such as semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and artificial intelligence), trade agreements that serve national interests based on reciprocity, safeguarding America's global leadership in the economic and financial fields, and the well-being of American families.
Bessent's words can be trivially dismissed as an attempt to legitimize some tools – such as duties customs, blocks naval, maintenance or revocation of international aid – which Trump is making much more unilateral use of in his second term than in his first, with the aim of bending the foreign and trade policies of other countries to the wishes and needs of the United States.
In reality, however, the use of economic means to pursue national security and foreign policy goals is not a specific element of Trumpism and has run throughout much of US history since the dawn of the Republic.
Trump as Hamilton
Bessent himself explicitly referred to the origins of this precedent, not only in his speech at the Economic Club of New York, but also in an editorial published the same day in the “Wall Street Journal” to summarize the salient aspects of his speech (Hamilton Inspires Trump's Economic Statecraft).
In particular, the Treasury Secretary cited a passage from the famous Report on Manufactures that the first holder of the ministry, Alexander Hamilton, appointed by George Washington, presented to Congress in 1791.
Hamilton stated that any country should produce everything it needed for not to depend on exports from abroad and, consequently, to protect the sovereignty, security and well-being of the nation.
The United States had seen its independence recognized only eight years before, following the Peace of Paris in 1783, which formally ended the war against England. According to Hamilton, economic self-sufficiency was an essential condition for the survival of the nation as a sovereign country.
For this reason, it was essential that the newly formed United States develop an industrial economy, which at the time was almost non-existent, due to the legacy of London's domination which had prohibited the installation of factories so that the thirteen colonies would act exclusively as suppliers of raw materials and markets for finished goods for English production.
As Hamilton wrote, “Not only the wealth, but the independence and security of a nation appear to be materially dependent on the prosperity of its manufactures.”
From this premise also arose the need to launch a protectionist trade policy, in order to protect the emerging manufacturing industries from competition from foreign imports through the imposition of high customs duties.
John Adams' "model treaty".
In fact, American “economic statecraft” even anticipated Hamilton's report. In 1776, while the war of independence against England It was still in its infancy, and the Continental Congress – the body of representatives of the colonies that had rebelled against London – charged one of its delegates, John Adams, with preparing a draft international treaty.
The United States would have used it as a model, adapting it according to the interlocutors and contingent needs, in defining their relationships with other nations.
Aware of the extreme military weakness of his country and with the ambition of focusing American foreign policy on different and innovative foundations compared to the force of arms, on which the European powers instead relied, Adams advanced the theory that the United States should have used trade as an instrument of national policy, I learn their markets to Friendly countries e closing them to the hostile ones.
In other words, he advocated the use of economic relations – rather than the threat or actual use of weapons – as the preferred means of obtaining favorable policies, benefits, and concessions from foreign states.
For example, the imposition of embargoes e customs duties It would have represented an effective alternative to military force in inducing other countries to assume positions advantageous to the United States.
This formula was less unrealistic than it might seem. Indeed, before the outbreak of hostilities with England, the thirteen colonies had managed to obtain the revocation of some tax measures they deemed unfair to them—such as the Sugar Act of 1764—by implementing boycotts of British imports.
The long season of protectionism
Il Adams's “Model Treaty” It remained unimplemented at the time. It is no coincidence that just two years after its formulation, the United States entered into an exclusively military alliance with France, whose armed intervention against England contributed significantly to the victory in the War of Independence.
Nonetheless, nearly thirty years later, in the midst of the transatlantic repercussions of the Napoleonic Wars, the United States made a timid attempt to resort to commercial coercion.
To try to force the European powers in conflict with each other to respect the rights of the United States as a neutral country, Congress in 1806 banned the importation of certain types of English goods and in December 1807 even went so far as to impose an embargo on the belligerents, although it was then forced to revoke the provision in 1809 because the measure damaged the economic interests of the New England States.
Instead, Congress promptly granted Hamilton's demands and raised the average tariff level to 12,5 percent of the value of imports between 1792 and the early 1800s.
However, contrary to what Bessent has implied and reiterated Francis Brooke In his recent Senate confirmation hearing as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Congress's primary goal in the late eighteenth century was to increase federal tax revenue at a time when income taxes did not yet exist.
At the outbreak of a second war against England in 1812, customs duties were raised to 25% to pay for military expenses, and thus once again to increase federal revenue.
Instead, at the end of hostilities, entrepreneurs asked for and obtained the maintenance of high duties, to face the competition from imports of manufactured goods, especially English ones, the flow of which had been restored with the return of peace.
Il protectionism – which peaked at 38% of manufactured goods and 45% of raw materials in 1828 – remained the foundation of US economic policy until after World War II.
The main exception was a brief period of tariff reduction in 1913, coinciding with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, which, in that same year, authorized Congress to levy income taxes.
Protectionism helped transform the United States from an agrarian society in the late eighteenth century into the industrial power that won both world wars and successfully confronted the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The Cold War
Just the cold war It led to the introduction of legislative measures, still in force, which effectively established the link between economic security and national security.
Il Defense Production Act of 1950, enacted immediately after the outbreak of the Korean War, allows the president to take control of industries whose production is vital to the country's defense and forces companies to give priority to federal government orders when necessary for national security.
Il Trade Expansion Act of 1962, designed primarily to face the competition of the European Economic Community, gave the White House tenant the power to impose tariffs on items whose import level constitutes a risk to national security.
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 authorizes the president to regulate foreign trade in response to “unusual and extraordinary” threats to national security emanating “in whole or in part” from foreign countries.
This measure integrated theTrading with the Enemy Act of 1917 which, at the time of Washington's entry into the First World War, introduced the obvious ban on trade with nations at war with the United States.
The 1977 provision, however, applies in peacetime and allows for the limitation of trade and transactions with countries deemed to be a source of danger for the United States.
The most striking case of recourse to the“economic statecraft” during the Cold War occurred on August 15, 1971, when the Republican Richard M. Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold and instituted a 10% surcharge on imports to prevent a hemorrhage of U.S. gold reserves and protect industrial production.
Beyond the clash with the Soviet Union
Nixon's intervention, aimed primarily at containing the economic competition of Washington's political partners and interrupting the potential flow of American gold towards them, demonstrates that the Cold War also represented a precedent for the fact that the protection of economic security was not pursued only against the United States' geostrategic antagonists.
For example, on the one hand, in response to theSoviet invasion of Afghanistan In December 1979, Democratic President Jimmy Carter placed an embargo on the sale of computers, other high-tech products, and oil drilling equipment to Moscow, as well as limiting the volume of grain exports.
On the other hand, a few years later, the one who was hit was also the Japan, although it was Washington's main ally in the Pacific theater in its role of containing the Soviet Union. Japan became the United States' largest creditor in 1982 and the country with the largest trade surplus three years later. Symbolizing Japan's hegemony over the American domestic market was the purchase of the Rockefeller Center in New York by the conglomerate Mitsubishi.
To address the perception of growing U.S. economic vulnerability to Tokyo, in 1987 the administration of Republican Ronald Reagan imposed 100% tariffs on imports of Japanese semiconductors.
The following year, following a Pentagon report that the technological superiority was “essential to U.S. defense systems,” Congress allocated half a billion dollars to support domestic microchip production, earmarking it to fund a consortium of fourteen companies, Sematech.
Biden and “economic statecraft”
Il Sematech case It was a preview of the measures that the Democratic administration Joe Biden It was adopted about a third of a century later. In 2022, the Chips and Science Act allocated nearly $53 billion to promote semiconductor research and encourage the reshoring of U.S. semiconductor companies to counter competition from the People's Republic of China, no longer from Japan.
For the same reason, the federal government encouraged the expansion of the open-pit mine Mountain Pass in California, the only U.S. site for the extraction of rare earths.
The following year, in justifying restrictions on the export of semiconductor manufacturing technology in Republic of ChinaBiden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, reiterated the complementarity of national and economic security: "America currently produces only about 10% of the world's semiconductors. This represents an economic risk and a weakness for national security."
More generally, Biden's economic policy aimed to overcome the United States' dependence on foreign suppliers for everything that could have a strategic importance in crisis situations, from a perspective that looked not only at national security but also at the strengthening employment in the industrial sector to contain the drain on his aides' votes towards Trump.
It is no coincidence that Biden's economic platform, starting in the 2020 election campaign, stated that manufacturing had been "the arsenal of democracy during World War II" and should be "part of the arsenal of prosperity today."
By virtue of this principle, citing reasons of economic security and making use of the Defense Production Act, just over two weeks before the end of his mandate at the White House, on January 3, 2025 Biden blocked the sale of the American steel giant US Steel Corporation to Japanese society Nippon Steel Corporation.
This decision marked a turning point in protecting America's economic security. It did not prevent a takeover attempt by a company controlled by the United States' main global rival, the People's Republic of China, nor did it affect the new technologies sector, which has the greatest impact on the defense industry.
“Economic statecraft” during US unipolarity
After all, “economic statecraft” did not end with the end of the Cold War, despite a decade of unipolarity dominated by the United States between the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001.
The preliminary version of the Defense Planning Guidance of the United States prepared in 1992 for the Republican president George HW Bush, which was supposed to remain secret but which the “New York Times” published extensive excerpts, warning of not only military but also economic threats that Washington would have to face in the coming years.
In particular, he identified among the goals of the United States' defense strategy the goal of "deterring" "advanced industrial nations" – a vague expression so as not to explicitly mention partners such as Japan, the recently reunified Germany, and the European Union – "from challenging our leadership, or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order."
Bush's successor in the White House, the Democrat Bill Clinton, conceived the export of the consumer culture typical of the American middle class and above all the diffusion of economic liberalism, under the aegis of the United States, through the integration of global markets, as indispensable tools to stabilize the international system and strengthen the governments that are expressions of liberal democracy that arose after the collapse of the Soviet-style totalitarian regimes.
This approach, among other things, led Clinton to negotiate over 250 free trade agreements.
The benefit to US national security would accrue, as Thomas L. Friedman sarcastically observed in “New York Times, arose from the observation that two nations with McDonald's restaurants had never gone to war with each other (Foreign Affairs Big Mac I, December 8, 1996).
Subsequently, in response to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, Republican George W. Bush favored military initiatives with the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001 and of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq in 2003.
However, he also resorted to forms of "economic statecraft". For example, he froze assets linked to terrorist groups. He also increased the duties on steel, but exempted from the major burden imports from Washington's partners such as Canada, Mexico e Israel.
Trump's Turnaround
On May 23rd of last year, reneging on a commitment made in the 2024 election campaign, Trump lifted the block on the acquisition of US Steel Corporation by the Nippon Steen Corporation, on the condition that the new Japanese owners would not move the company's headquarters from Pittsburgh, appoint an American CEO, accept that a majority of the board members would be American citizens, and give the US president veto power over certain corporate decisions.
In light of this about-face by the tycoon, the “economic statecraft” invoked by Bessent might seem like a manifestation of those erratic and unpredictable initiatives that are generally attributed to the policies of the Trump administration.
Instead, it represents a form of government intervention in the economy in the name of national security that is deeply rooted in American tradition.
Rather, what marked the change that came with The Donald were the radicalism of Trump's initiatives and the institutional conflict that resulted from the subtraction of prerogatives from the legislative power in favor of the executive.
For example, on the one hand, the tycoon not only invoked theInternational Emergency Economic Powers Act more times than all his predecessors put together. When he availed himself of it in the so-called "Liberation Day” of April 2, 2025, it did not hit a particular country or a limited number of countries.
Instead, he imposed a global tariff package against around ninety nations, based on alleged criteria of reciprocity, arguing that the US trade deficit with each of them – including Washington's strategic allies – would constitute a risk to national security.
On the other hand, on Liberation Day itself, The Donald committed an illegitimate act, as later established by the Supreme Court in the Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump ruling of February 20, because the law does not allow the president to unilaterally establish tariffs without consulting Congress.
The new import tariffs announced on Friday are a new attempt by the tycoon to impersonate Washington lawmakers, this time using the pretext that the penalized products would be made abroad with the use of forced labor.
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Stefano Luconi
He teaches US History in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Ancient Sciences at the University of Padua. His publications include: The "Indispensable Nation." A History of the United States from the Colonies to Trump's Second Presidency (2026) US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022), The black soul of the United States. African Americans and the difficult path towards equality, 1619-2023 (2023). The race for the White House 2024. The election of the president of the United States from the primaries to beyond the vote on November 5 (2024).
