We’re convening in half an hour with Dalibor Roháč to discuss his new book Unshackled: How Economic Growth Can Defeat the World’s Dictators.
From the invitation:
The West has spent the past decade rediscovering geopolitics. Defense budgets are rising. Governments speak of economic security, strategic autonomy, resilient supply chains, industrial policy, stockpiles, export controls, and the restoration of manufacturing. The optimistic confidence of the post–Cold War era has given way to an increasingly urgent conviction that economic policy must serve strategic ends. This has produced a strange admixture of prudent preparation, fashionable dirigisme, and—under Trump—outright vandalism.
Our economic statecraft, argues Dalibor Roháč, is not strengthening us. To the contrary, on both sides of the Atlantic, the West is preparing for great-power competition by steadily weakening the qualities that once made it formidable: its open markets, technological dynamism, attractiveness to talent, scientific excellence, and its ability to build almost anything at tolerable cost. It is responding to the threat by becoming more like the closed, dirigiste systems it is trying to defeat—protectionist, suspicious of foreigners, preoccupied with national self-sufficiency, and increasingly willing to subordinate markets and institutions to executive power.
In his new book, Unshackled: How Economic Growth Can Defeat the World’s Dictators, Dalibor argues that this isn’t strategic realism. It’s strategic self-sabotage.
See you soon!
The Zoom link is below the paywall.
