Munich Security Conference: MSC@Amerikahaus

Since 2024, members of the Journal of Geoeconomics community have embedded geoeconomics more firmly into the global security agenda through the Munich Security Conference. MSC@Amerikahaus-Emerging Leaders is an official side-event programme that provides a setting in which researchers, policy practitioners, institutions, and emerging leaders address pressing international-security questions. Under the leadership and support of D. Matthew Millar, Robin Arens, and Liliana Filip, two events have examined future geoeconomic scenarios involving economic statecraft, strategic dependencies, and industrial policy. They have convened trilateral North American, European, and Indo-Pacific actors and perspectives on matters of economic security, supply-chain resilience, and strategic competition.

Side Event on Subsidy Driven Trade Wars

Their 2024 participation explored whether policies intended to accelerate decarbonisation could also unintentionally intensify great-power competition via subsidy driven trade wars. It brought together Tatsuya Terazawa, Chairman and CEO of the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan; Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of the United States; and Senator Peter M. Boehm of Canada for a dialogue moderated by DW’s Emily Gordine.

Emily Gordine, Tatsuya Terazawa, Senator Peter Boehm, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and Dr. Meike Zwingenberger —Munich, February 2024.

The discussion considered the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act, the European Union’s Green Deal Industrial Plan and Net-Zero Industry Act, and China’s central position in clean-technology manufacturing and supply chains. It directly addressed the risk of subsidy-driven trade wars: whether large-scale incentives, domestic-content requirements, technology policy, and trade measures could strengthen industrial capacity while also provoking retaliation, fragmenting markets, disrupting supply chains, and deepening strategic rivalry.

Side Event on the Weaponization of Strategic Supply Chains

In 2025, the focus shifted from subsidy-driven trade conflict to the weaponisation of strategic supply chains in a dialogue with Josef Braml, European Director of the Trilateral Commission; Anna Rosenberg, Head of Geopolitics, Amundi; Jorgo Chatzimakakis, CEO of Hydrogen Europe; and Gerard Reid, Partner and Co-Founder of Alexa Capital.

The event was moderated by Liliana Filip and examined how control over production, key technologies and components, critical infrastructure, export markets, and maritime chokepoints can be converted into political leverage. It considered how sanctions, trade restrictions, disruption to critical infrastructure, and hybrid threats can turn economic interdependence into coercion. The discussion asked how governments and firms could reduce vulnerabilities and strengthen resilience without reproducing the protectionism, exclusion, and strategic fragmentation they seek to avoid.

Liliana Filip, Josef Braml, Jorgo Chatzimakakis, and Anna Rosenberg — Munich, February 2025.

Further Reading

The following articles provide relevant context on the themes discussed above:

• Between Sanctions and Subsidies: Geoeconomic Lessons from the Semiconductor Ecosystem
  Industrial policy, export controls, investment screening, and supply-chain security in the semiconductor sector.

• Countering China’s Economic Coercion: Lessons from Japan
  Export restrictions, economic coercion, rare earth elements, and resilience.

• Towards an Economic Security Alliance: The Architecture of Collective Resilience in the Age of Geoeconomics
  Coordinated responses to strategic interdependence, critical raw materials, emerging technologies, and economic coercion.

Participants in the side event on the weaponization of strategic supply chains — Munich, February 2025.