Glossary
Plain-language definitions for terms you'll encounter in geopolitics and international economics.
G7
An informal grouping of seven advanced economies — the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Canada — plus the European Union as a non-enumerated participant. The G7 holds annual leaders' summits and coordinates positions on macroeconomic, geopolitical, and trade issues.
Geoeconomics
Using economic tools — tariffs, sanctions, investment screening, subsidies, export controls — to pursue what used to be considered purely strategic goals. Edward Luttwak coined the term in a 1990 *National Interest* essay arguing that after the Cold War, economic instruments would replace military ones as the main currency of great-power competition. Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris developed the framework into a full doctrine in *War by Other Means* (2016), cataloguing how China, Russia, and the United States each use trade and finance for coercion. The post-2018 tariff wars, the post-2022 Russia sanctions architecture, the October 2022 US semiconductor export controls, and the EU's anti-coercion instrument are all geoeconomic moves. The category is broader than 'economic statecraft' because it includes defensive industrial policy — onshoring, friend-shoring, supply-chain diversification — alongside offensive measures. Critics, including Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in their later work on 'weaponised interdependence', argue that Luttwak's original frame underweighted the structural choke-points — dollar-clearing, the SWIFT messaging layer, ASML lithography — that determine who can actually coerce whom. See the export-controls and sanctions analyses on this site for case studies.