Michael Mastanduno

Michael Mastanduno is an American political scientist whose work explains how security competition, economic exchange and alliance bargaining interact. He belongs in context as a scholar, not as a statecraft practitioner. Dartmouth's current faculty record, checked on 29 July 2026, establishes his institutional role; it does not imply that the university endorses the arguments summarised here.

Economic containment

In Economic Containment, Mastanduno reconstructed the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, or CoCom, as an alliance bargain. He distinguished broad economic warfare, intended to weaken an opponent's economy, from a strategic embargo limited to militarily significant goods. United States governments often sought wider denial, while allies with commercial interests in East-West trade pressed for a narrower regime. The book traces how consensus rules, control lists and recurring disputes sustained the system without giving CoCom supranational authority.

His later work placed economic instruments inside broader debates over relative gains and national security. It shows why states can resist mutually beneficial exchange when they expect a rival to gain strategically, and why a coalition's common security interest does not eliminate distributional conflict. These are analytical claims, not official doctrine or evidence that Mastanduno designed a government policy.

The distinction remains useful for separating targeted technology containment from campaigns aimed at general economic degradation. Any application to current controls requires independent legal and empirical evidence. It cannot be inferred from a 1992 study or attributed to Mastanduno as a current policy view.

The profile therefore records a contribution to conceptual and alliance analysis. It makes no claim of priority over earlier scholars, direct influence on officials or authorship of this encyclopedia's categories.

See also

CoCom · Technology containment (Cold War model) · Coalition coverage (the coverage problem) · Economic warfare

Sources

1. Dartmouth College, Michael Mastanduno, checked 29 July 2026.
2. Michael Mastanduno, *Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade* (Cornell University Press, 1992).
3. Michael Mastanduno, Economics and security in statecraft and scholarship, International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998).
4. Michael Mastanduno, Do relative gains matter? America's response to Japanese industrial policy, International Security 16, no. 1 (1991).
5. Wilson Center Digital Archive, Economic Cold War collection. Use individual translated documents with their provenance.
6. Michael Mastanduno, Strategies of economic containment: United States trade relations with the Soviet Union, World Politics 37, no. 4 (1985).