There are some questions that people have long asked themselves at a deep psychological level. How secure do I feel? Who is threatening me? How could I be safer? These days, every trade-dependent economy in the world is searching within itself for answers.Three years after Covid-affected supply chains starting freezing up, and as US-China geoeconomic rivalry intensifies, “economic security” is a buzzphrase in the ministries of big trading powers such as Japan and the EU. Brussels started to look at it in earnest over the summer under the snappily alliterative rubric of “promoting, protecting, partnering” (respectively encouraging growth, defending against unfair trade and working with allies).

It’s a massively elastic concept — in fact a fresh framing of a longstanding issue — that’s going to need a lot of refining. Economic security could remain limited to controls on sensitive technology, such as the high-end semiconductor production equipment of which the Netherlands will restrict sales to China after being leaned on by Washington. It could extend into value network-critical inputs like rare earth minerals. Or it could expand, as some more dirigiste European officials would like, into building a broad industrial base including products with relatively few national security implications such as electric vehicles.

The problems of designing and implementing policy are legion. European trade officials are bracing themselves for their territory to be invaded by battalions of securocrats with no sense of trade-offs between promoting growth and reducing vulnerability. (A hunter-gatherer society living in caves would be perfectly resilient to Chinese infiltration of 5G networks.) A broad definition will also be expensive, either through public investment and subsidies or by European consumers paying more for taxed or restricted imports.