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2 May 2022

JAPAN’S EFFECTIVENESS AS A GEO-ECONOMIC ACTOR: NAVIGATING GREAT-POWER COMPETITION

Yuka Koshino

Geo-economic strategy is not new: deploying economic instruments to secure foreign-policy aims and to project power has long been a core part of many countries’ statecraft even before the advent of the term itself.1 Analysts, meanwhile, have often sought to explain the link between economics and power. Writing in 1938, philosopher Bertrand Russell called economics an element in the ‘science of power’.2 In his seminal 1945 study of Germany’s use of trade policy in the run-up to the Second World War, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, Albert O. Hirschman wrote of how ‘foreign economic relations can be used ... as an instrument of national power policy’.3 Writing in the 1970s, political scientist Joseph S. Nye spoke of ‘the two-edged sword’ nature of economic interdependence in international relations, citing the ‘economic aspect’ of national security.4 In his 1987 study, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy, analysing imperial overstretch and the economic limits to national power, wrote: ‘all of the major shifts in the world’s military-power balances have followed alterations in the productive balances ... where victory has always gone to the side with the greatest material resources.’ 5 The practice of geo-economics has an inseparable relationship with what might be termed ‘economic security’ – the safe-guarding of national economic prosperity. Without a thriving national economy that is resilient to potential hostile measures by international adversaries, no state can use economic power effectively in order to achieve its geopolitical goals.

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