Economic Security First: Regulatory Chokepoints and the Coercive Turn in Industrial Policy

Industrial policy has re-emerged as a central tool for policymakers and is increasingly justified in terms of national security.^[1] Beneath this securitized framing lies a more specific logic: States are no longer just supporting industries, but engineering chokepoints of a different kind than those classically associated with geography or infrastructure. Where traditional chokepoints control physical passage – a strait, a border, a port – industrial policy chokepoints operate through control over inputs, technologies, and production capacity themselves, deliberately concentrated to gain leverage over rivals or to insulate against being leveraged in turn. This distinction runs through the rest of this piece: subsidies that pull strategic production inward, and export restrictions that withhold critical inputs outward, are treated here as two faces of the same underlying logic – industrial policy as chokepoint. This dynamic defines the US-China geoeconomic rivalry, and export dependencies are shaping the EU's industrial policies in turn.^[2]