James Sullivan
A country’s economy is core to its national security, driving significant discourse regarding economic warfare. Current strategies, however, are driven more by political expediency than tactical efficacy. These strategies are based on the hope that “narrow” approaches targeting specific industry sectors or “nice” approaches avoiding harm to large population segments will drive impact. Hope, however, is not a strategy.
Narrow and nice economic warfare strategies are rarely effective. The “small yard, high fence” approach targeting specific industry segments fails in an increasingly interconnected global supply chain with rapidly changing industry linkages. Sanctions targeting elites have not splintered them from leadership; indeed, recent examples have shown the ability to further cement elite loyalty through windfall profits.
Effective economic warfare strategies target the foundation of a nation’s power: its economy and people. This paper suggests that such a strategy can leverage or create broad economic dislocations within a society and then allow those dislocations to be weaponized through disinformation campaigns that aim to manipulate the political beliefs of broader civil society. The integration of economic warfare and disinformation builds on Nye and Wilson’s idea that any separation of hard and soft power creates “an imperfect, dichotomous debate” given that state power increasingly combines hard power and a “nation’s capacity to create and manipulate knowledge and information.”
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