Geo-economics redux

Mark Thirlwell, director at the Lowy Institute avers that the current international environment marked by an increasingly dense entanglement of issues related to international economics, national security and foreign policy lends itself to a return to the idea of geo-economics with key issues around multi-polarity, pax mercatoria, globalisation, state capitalism, resource scarcity, risks arising from the global financial crisis. In a Lowy Institute Perspectives article, "The return to geo-economics: Globalisation and national security", he concludes that this could lead to two potential consequences: an improved quality of analysis with inputs from economics, foreign policy and security while these would be tempered by underlying assumption of zero-sum outcomes.