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The word "strategic" does a lot of work. If it didn't appear in the title this discussion with Piti Disyatat, Selena Ling, and Albert Park, expertly moderated by Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, would have taken a completely different arc.
This recording youtube.com/watch?v=Mlu… has what we all said.
My key points --- fleshed out with real-world detail in the event --- concerned how even as the global economy is ruptured by ever more disturbances and policymakers focus more on building resilience for economic security, what is key is that the nature of shocks has changed.
Geopolitics is not just more shocks. It is shocks that bear intentionality.
Economic security is the capacity of the economy to sustain societal well-being and prosperity against shocks. We need to improve it by acknowledging that natural-event shocks (pandemics, crop failures, floods, tsunamis) take a different set of tools to address than geoeconomic shocks: tariffs, sanctions, supply-chain disruptions, and export controls come with intentionality from adversarial nations.
Natural-event shocks put the policymaker in a single-agent optimisation problem, for which pure strategies are best responses. On the other hand, we know from game theory that best responses against intentional shocks can call for mixed strategies, not least to lower our predicability for our adversary.
Small states need to expand their strategy space in a world of geoeconomics and strategic interdependence. Alignment, acquiescence, and adaptation and mitigation would look very different in just an interdependent world, rather than a strategically interdependent one.
Quah, Danny. 2026. "Southeast Asia's Crossfire Shock: From Multilateralism to Geoeconomics and Strategic Interdependence", Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy Working Paper (Jun)
