Future Program: National Security Economic Theory (NASCENT)

The National Security Economic Theory (NASCENT) program aims to establish a theoretical foundation for geoeconomics, enabling evidence-based economic statecraft and defining a rigorous scholarly field of quantitative geoeconomics. The program seeks to achieve two main objectives: testing the technical hypothesis that economic mechanism design, computer science formal methods, and experimental economics can be combined to construct a robust scientific framework for geoeconomics, and preventing strategic surprise by building methodologies and tools to anticipate and mitigate unintended consequences of economic statecraft. • The program will focus on creating a principled foundation for national security economic strategy and defining a new scholarly field of quantitative geoeconomics. • The program will combine techniques from economic mechanism design, formal methods, and experimental economics to work backwards from precisely described desired national security states to understand what economic incentives and mechanisms enable those outcomes. • The program seeks to enable theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded economic statecraft to be the norm across the U.S. Government. • The program aims to harness strategic surprise by building the methodologies and tools necessary to both anticipate and mitigate unintended consequences of economic statecraft.