In late October 2025, the United States signed a series of new economic agreements that were noteworthy less for their commercial scope than for their focus on national security objectives. Bilateral arrangements with Malaysia and Cambodia involved commitments regarding export controls, investment screening, and other security-related trade measures.¹ Washington also announced new arrangements with Japan and Australia that aim to secure critical minerals supplies through policy coordination, investment support, and supply chain measures.² These deals depart markedly from the template of typical international economic agreements that prevailed in the recent past. Whereas earlier agreements sought to reduce barriers to exchange on a broadly non-discriminatory basis, motivated by the efficiency gains from integration, the new ones are discriminatory by design and motivated by resilience and strategic control. What might this mean for international economic law and cooperation?

The agreements reflect a broader transformation in the relationship between security and economic exchange in world politics. In recent years, a growing number of governments have introduced domestic frameworks for economic security, aiming to manage vulnerabilities arising from economic interdependence. In parallel, governments have begun translating these domestic agendas into new forms of international diplomacy and governance, addressing issues ranging from the collective deterrence of economic coercion to the friendshoring of mineral supply chains. In the time since this special section was first conceived, the trend has only accelerated. The United States has announced at least six further agreements with dedicated sections featuring similiar provisions to those found in the Malaysia and Cambodia deals,³ while bilateral arrangements between other pairs of states have also proliferated.⁴

These agreements have generated considerable debate and commentary, but with a few notable exceptions (see, for example, Gertz 2025; Lester 2025), much of the discussion has occurred within relatively siloed academic and policy circles. Yet the questions these arrangements raise cut across various disciplinary and practitioner areas. No single field – international law, political economy, or security studies – can fully account for their implications in isolation. Are these agreements legally enforceable? Will they produce meaningful economic or security outcomes, or largely serve as declaratory signals? How do they interact with the existing architecture of international economic law? More fundamentally, do these arrangements constitute law in a meaningful sense, or do they reflect a shift toward more discretionary, power-mediated forms of economic governance? Answering these questions requires perspectives from a variety of fields, and fostering such exchange is a central aim of this journal. Accordingly, this section brings together scholars and practitioners working across political economy, law, and international security.

The section opens with Drezner, who provides a broad theoretical frame for the emergence of economic security as a candidate organising principle for the post-liberal international order. He explains why the surge in economic security agreements is unsurprising, while identifying several structural reasons to question their durability as the foundations of a new regime, including the nebulous conceptual foundations of economic security and the inability of the world’s largest economy to credibly commit to the agreements it signs. Accordingly, he suggests, “the durability of any nascent international regime oriented around economic security must be viewed with a skeptical eye.”

Solís and Katada then offer a granular case study of U.S.-Japan economic security cooperation, tracing new bilateral deals under the second Trump administration and examining how Japan is retooling its economic security strategies while grappling with a partner whose commitments are volatile and approach is sometimes extractive.

Zooming out from the Japan case, Harrell surveys the Trump administration’s new trade deals more broadly, dissecting their economic security provisions and highlighting their unprecedented scope and asymmetric character – what he terms “economic security with hegemonic characteristics.”

Shagina then examines how new agreements are being used as vehicles for extending U.S. export control enforcement beyond American borders, showing how the Trump administration has embedded anti-diversion commitments into bilateral deals through what she describes as a “linkage model” that bundles tariffs, export controls, and sanctions into a single incentive structure, while assessing the potentials and limitations of this approach.

Finally, Gao argues that the significance of the new agreements lies in their role as instruments for addressing the China challenge indirectly through third countries, effectively enlisting partner states as nodes in a U.S.-led economic security perimeter. His analysis also brings the legal stakes into sharp relief: examining how they sit vis-à-vis core provisions of the GATT and in particular strain the Most Favoured Nation principle in ways that implicate not only Washington but also the partner countries that sign them. The result, on Gao’s account, reveals “the uneven capacity of states to operate in a world where power increasingly substitutes for principles.”

Read alongside one another, the contributions illuminate how economic security cooperation is not simply being layered onto the existing international economic order but appears to be transforming the function of trade agreements, the scope of permissible state intervention, and the expectations that govern modern economic relations. At the same time, the commentaries make clear just how much remains unsettled: the legal character of these arrangements, whether they will cohere into a new architecture or remain fragmented ad hoc responses, and how states and firms will adapt. As economic security agreements continue to proliferate, examining these questions will be essential. By bringing multiple perspectives together, the section offers some initial building blocks for taking that enterprise forward.