Young, Berger Op-Ed: America Needs a National Economic Security Strategy to Counter China’s Rise

The following column by Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) and General David Berger was published in The Hill on March 14, 2025.

By Senator Todd Young and General David Berger

As America confronts an ambitious economic and military peer in China, we desperately require a more coherent playbook for protecting and using our significant economic tools and assets. It is time to complement our national military strategy with a National Economic Security Strategy to keep the peace and sustain our geopolitical competitiveness.

One example of why a wider strategy is urgently needed is the recent fixation on the so-called “Davidson Window” — the time of supposed maximum danger for a potential forcible Chinese seizure of Taiwan.

Remarkably, a brief exchange in a single House Armed Services Committee hearing in 2021 drove Congress to spend additional billions of dollars for military operations and the procurement of military hardware in an attempt to make our forces more prepared to deter any such seizure, or to defeat it in combat if an actual attempt is made.

As a sitting U.S. senator and a former commandant of the Marine Corps, we accept that the most effective means to establish deterrence is lethal hardware that can be produced rapidly at scale to destroy widespread enemy targets to influence the enemy’s will.

However, as many others have noted, the U.S. currently lacks the ability to mass-produce that hardware. Despite that inconvenient truth, too many voices in the defense community continue to seek ever larger appropriations in hopes that at some point we will reach a tipping point, at which time more money will actually result in better outcomes. We have not been there for some time.

Given macroeconomic and budgetary realities, the public cannot be expected to maintain support for hard-power solutions and investments unless policymakers connect it to a larger and more formal strategy of employing every possible tool of national power at our disposal in a way that establishes and sustains deterrence while also ensuring the prosperity and economic security of the American people.

Establishing such a strategy will require the entirety of the executive branch, not just those departments and agencies typically considered to be the sole owners of our national security policy, and it will require consultation with our private sector and our private capital markets as we seek to empower greater private economic activity and dynamism.

Congress took a productive step towards formalizing this process through the CHIPS and Science Act, including by directing a strategy and report on the nation’s competitiveness and federal science, research and innovation enterprises that will follow the publication of the National Security Strategy. We believe this effort would be complemented by a full assessment of the nation’s economic power, including our tax and trade policy, our sanctions strategy, the right calibration of our export control regime, the integrity of our supply chains, the security of our capital markets and transparency in capital flows, and other means at our disposal to insulate ourselves from coercion or exogenous shocks, like a global pandemic or regional military adventurism by China.

Take one example currently in the news: tariffs. President Trump is rightly focused on ensuring that American industry and consumers get the best possible deal while holding foreign trade partners to fair standards.

At the same time, providing greater clarity on the strategic objectives behind these tariffs would help businesses, policymakers and consumers navigate their long-term effects. While maintaining flexibility in negotiations is valuable, a clearer sense of how these measures fit into a broader economic framework could reinforce confidence and stability.

Are these tariffs intended primarily as a negotiating tool, a long-term restructuring of trade relationships or a means of protecting key industries from foreign influence? How do they fit into a larger vision for economic resilience and supply chain security? And how do we ensure that their benefits outweigh potential downstream effects on American consumers and industries?

How can we reverse decades of planning neglect and ensure the federal government has a full understanding of the ways and means at its disposal?

First, in shaping the strategy mandated by the CHIPS and Science Act, the Trump administration should consider expanding the scope of the strategy to include a full accounting of the policy areas listed above that can be synergized to the benefit of our economic security.

In addition, we encourage Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to quickly implement the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act and establish a National Defense Economic Competition Research Council in order to identify and counter economic actions that seek to disadvantage our defense posture. 

Finally, we encourage the Trump administration and Congress to accelerate smart investments in our domestic manufacturing base, to include investments in a modern defense industrial base, as well as those necessary to secure our supply chains and create and sustain advantages in emerging technologies. Our collective procrastination with our economic security strategy must end — and end now.

The interconnectedness between the deployment of hard power and the shepherding of our national economic might was obvious to the Founders. Article I, Section 8, Clause 13 of the United States Constitution provides Congress the power “to provide and maintain a Navy.”

What was the purpose of this Navy? Not to empower conquest, but to provide security to a maritime nation so that Americans’ ingenuity, vitality and natural bounty might be put to their highest and best use. As a maritime nation, maritime trade was our lifeblood. Livelihoods, prosperity and economic growth relied upon it, and as our trade grew, the need to grow our Navy to protect it also grew.

We must harken back to those days and remind ourselves that America’s military power must serve to protect our prosperity and the ultimate source of that military power: our national wealth and economic growth. 

To best understand this and prepare for storms on the horizon, we must put a comprehensive National Economic Security Strategy to paper that complements our other national security and defense planning documents. This was needed before the COVID-19 pandemic and increased Chinese saber-ratting around Taiwan. It is even more necessary now.

Todd Young is the senior senator from Indiana and Gen. David H. Berger (ret.) is former commandant of the Marine Corps.