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Abstract

National security exceptions have long been part of international trade law, but their use has expanded alongside the rise of economic statecraft. States now increasingly rely on geoeconomic tools such as sanctions, subsidies, tariffs, and investment and export controls to pursue geopolitical goals. This phenomenon, described by political scientists as “weaponized interdependence,” has blurred the boundary between economic policy and national security, thereby straining the integrity of WTO rules and the multilateral trading system.

Against this backdrop, how can states promote rule-of-law values such as transparency and predictability on the international plane as they implement geoeconomic policies?

This Article makes two contributions to the international law literature. First, it advances global administrative law scholarship by underscoring the relevance of procedural principles in domains often treated as exceptional and by showing how recurring regulatory practices across legal systems can inform early-stage conversations around transnational economic security governance.

Second, the Article complements international economic law scholarship by identifying a set of procedural norms embedded in the domestic administration of trade and investment security: agency findings, notice and transparency, consultation, proportionality, temporal limits, periodic review, and neutral oversight. Drawing on a comparative analysis of seven jurisdictions—China, Japan, the Netherlands, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union— the Article examines how these shared procedural features interact with existing multilateral frameworks and suggests that they provide a pragmatic basis for managing economic security measures in a deeply contested global order.

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