Gearing up for Economic Statecraft

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2020

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David McCormick, the CEO of Bridgewater Associates — the world's largest hedge fund, dropped in on the pod to talk about how the United States can prepare itself to compete in a new era in which, more than ever, economic security is national security. Speaking from decades of experience at the highest levels of industry and government, McCormick lays out what America needs to do from policy to innovation to government reorganization to immigration to talent management and beyond. He also discusses the state of the global economy, the impact of COVID-19, and how America's economy could be reshaped to realize equality of opportunity. Want more? Don't miss his essay in the Texas National Security Review with co-authors Charles Luftig and James Cunningham: "Economic Might, National Security, and the Future of American Statecraft."

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.
0:15.7	My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the CEO of War on the Rocks.
0:18.4	Earlier this year, David McCormick, Charles Leftig, and James Cunningham wrote a really important article on economic
0:23.8	state craft in the Texas National Security Review, our sister journal.
0:28.3	Dave is the CEO of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund.
0:32.4	In it he lays out an important vision of how the United States might preserve its power in an era of increasing competition not just on the national security side, but on the economic side.
0:41.0	And critically they lay out how these two things are linked and
0:44.8	how the United States can do better at treating them as if they were linked.
0:48.5	Here's my conversation with Dave. What made you want to write this and what made you think that now is the time to have this conversation?
0:59.0	Well, yeah, thanks. There were sort of two things that were on my mind when we started to think about this paper. The first was just thinking back to my experience in the government and recognizing that I had been really straddled between the national security side of the policy process and the economic side of the security process and had thought at the time, but then thought now that never, that those policy
1:26.7	processes were somewhat divergent from one another and that we really weren't
1:30.2	thinking about economic security and national security within a holistic
1:35.1	integrated way. The second thing that prompted me to think about writing this was
1:39.4	the recognition that the world's changing a lot and the combination of emerging technologies,
1:46.0	growing interdependence across the global economy, including dependence on the U.S. and other economies,
1:52.0	and the ubiquitous role of cyberspace in everything
1:56.1	from elections to commerce to escaping the impact of sanctions, all sort of came to me as changing dynamics that made the need for thinking about
2:06.8	economic security and national security together is more critical than ever before. And the combination of those two things
2:14.4	prompted me to think about working with some colleagues
2:17.3	to write a piece about that convergence of forces
2:21.2	in the need to change our policy process.
2:23.0	Going back into your bio, could you talk about some of these formative policy experiences
	...

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