Introduction

A few years back, Robert Zoellick, former President of the World Bank, wrote an article that became a classic, praising a US foreign policy tradition which had been deeply infused with economic logic for its first 150 years. ¹ Zoellick then argued that after the start of the Cold War, Washington marginalized economics in the global war against communism. In the process, Robert D. Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris note, Washington too often reached for the “gun instead of the purse.” Not surprisingly, the systematic use of economic instruments to accomplish geopolitical objectives (or what Blackwill and Harris call “geo-economics”) became a lost art. ²