Banks, Not Tanks: Using Money as a Geopolitical Tool

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

Security, Americas

Economic power can help secure America's interests.

In my last article, I noted that the tendency to define U.S. power as the ability to deploy military force was running up against clear limits, because “without the ability to instantaneously transport equipment and personnel from one area to another, the United States must either massively increase its defense and security expenditures to increase its presence in all theaters, trust that allies will finally meet the challenge and increase their own spending to fill in the gaps, or accept risks in certain areas.” Thus, my conclusion was the need for the United States to think in global terms and to prioritize the allocation of its military resources.

Such calls make some people nervous—that any sort of retrenchment will leave U.S. interests in other areas vulnerable and exposed. This thinking is reinforced by the belief that the only sign of a U.S. commitment is the use of the military instrument. Indeed, one of the tendencies in American national security policy over the last sixteen years has been increasing militarization of the U.S. response—and the shrinking of available options to an unpalatable binary choice between using force or doing nothing. This dilemma is intensified because, as Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris lament, “the United States too often reaches for the gun instead of the purse in its international conduct.” This is not just the conclusion of two “outsider” academics, but two distinguished public servants and national security professionals who have made the case for decreasing American reliance on military force as the premier way to influence international events from within administrations of both parties.

The United States has core vital interests in three broad regions of the world—the Euro-Atlantic, the Asia-Pacific and the greater Middle East—as well as the need to secure the Western Hemisphere from destabilization and to convert Africa from being an exporter of problems to a net contributor to global peace and prosperity. The military instrument is insufficient to achieve all of these tasks, yet, as they point out, the “United States instinctively debates the application of military instruments to address all of these complex challenges” while paying far less attention to the “use of economic instruments to accomplish geopolitical objectives.”