Lawfare Daily: The New Command Economy with Kristen Eichensehr and Ashley Deeks

Over the past decade, the U.S. has expanded its use of measures including tariffs, sanctions, export controls, and investment screening to regulate the economy in the name of national security. It has also embraced new ones such as government-owned equity stakes in private companies and new stockpiles of critical materials. Kristen Eichensehr, a law professor at Harvard, and Ashley Deeks, a law professor at the University of Virginia—and former legal counsel to the National Security Council—have an article in the Harvard National Security Journal arguing that the U.S. is seeing the emergence of a "new command economy" in which the government plays a much more activist economic role than it has in many decades.

Deeks and Eichensehr join Lawfare Contributing Editor and host of the Security Economics podcast Peter Harrell to unpack what the new command economy is, what it means for companies and the government, and how we should be thinking about incorporating basic legal values like transparency and oversight into this emerging framework.

This episode is part of the Security Economics podcast series, in which Peter Harrell and guests explore the intersection of economics and national security, how countries manage their economies to support national security, and how they deploy economic tools in support of geopolitical objectives.

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