For the past thirty years, globalization made the modern economy feel almost frictionless: a chip could be designed in one country, manufactured in another, assembled in a third, financed through global capital markets, and sold everywhere. Multinational companies were built on that assumption. Governments largely encouraged it. Consumers benefited from it. And yet the same system that made the world richer has now become one of its greatest sources of leverage, coercion, and strategic vulnerability. What happens when the links that once created efficiency become the pressure points states can use against each other?

In this episode, Max Zenglein joins Potentia to unpack the rise of economic security, why governments and companies often mean very different things when they use the term, why Japan and China appear more advanced in aligning  ...