For the country’s first 200 years, U.S. policymakers regularly employed economic means to achieve strategic interests.  But somewhere along the way, the United States began to tell itself a different story about geoeconomics.  Around the time of the Vietnam War, and on through the later stages of the Cold War, policymakers began to see economics as a realm with an authority and logic all its own, no longer subjugated to state power….International economic policymaking emerged as the near-exclusive province of economists and like-minded policymakers….

At the very time that economic statecraft has become a lost art in the United States, U.S. adversaries are embracing it.  China, Russia, and other countries now routinely look to geoeconomics as a means of first resort, often to undermine U.S. power and influence….

In a rare point of agreement between them, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson shared a basic enthusiasm for economic tools of foreign policy.  Hamilton, the father of American capitalism, stressed the value of commerce as a weapon, a proposition that few trade policy-makers would agree with today….