Global Economy Needs Helsinki-Style Rules for Geoeconomic Security

An opinion piece in the South China Morning Post argues that the global economy, now obsessed with security, needs a Helsinki-style process to manage the risks of weaponised trade. The article draws on the Cold War precedent of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the 1985 Stockholm Document, which established confidence-building measures such as prior notification, observation, information exchange, and verification. These measures did not require trust between adversaries but reduced uncertainty and made military competition more predictable. The author contends that today's economic competition, where governments view dependence as a security risk, has shifted from efficiency to resilience, from 'just in time' to 'just in case'. This shift, however, creates a geoeconomic security dilemma: one country's resilience is perceived as another's preparation for decoupling, leading to a spiral of localisation, export restrictions, and alternative networks. Each step is rational individually, but collectively they increase costs for all. The article calls for a similar ambition to establish ground rules for economic competition, making it more transparent, bounded, and predictable, as was done for military competition during the Cold War.