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Opinion
The security-obsessed global economy needs its own Helsinki process
Cold War rivals used ground rules to make competition more transparent, bounded and predictable. Today’s weaponised trade needs the same ambition
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Hao Nan is a Susan Strange Associate Fellow with the Helsinki Geoeconomics Society, and a Nuclear Futures Fellow with Ploughshares Fund & Horizon 2045.
Forty years ago, the Stockholm Document turned the political promise of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act into a more practical system of confidence-building. Amid the Cold War, Europe’s East and West did not disarm, abandon deterrence or begin to trust one another. Instead, they agreed that military competition could be made safer through prior notification, observation, information exchange and verification. The lesson was modest but durable: adversaries do not need trust to reduce uncertainty.
That logic is now needed beyond the military sphere. Today’s world is not divided into Cold War-style military blocs. Yet in trade, technology, artificial intelligence, critical minerals and supply chains, increasingly security-oriented economic networks are forming around the United States and China. Export controls, sanctions, investment screening, industrial policy and resource restrictions are turning interdependence into a potential source of vulnerability.
For three decades, globalisation rewarded concentration. Firms sourced from the cheapest producer, countries specialised and supply chains were designed around “just in time”. That system lowered costs, but it also created chokepoints.
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