Roger W. Robinson

Roger W. Robinson Jr. is an American former banker and government official who, as Senior Director of International Economic Affairs on Ronald Reagan's National Security Council from 1982 to 1985, helped develop policy intended to constrain Soviet hard-currency earnings and access to Western technology and credit. He later advocated using capital-market access against strategic adversaries through private research organisations.

The Soviet hard-currency squeeze

Robinson came to the NSC from Chase Manhattan, where he had worked on lending involving the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. National Security Decision Directive 66 of 29 November 1982 set a presidential policy covering Soviet energy technology, allied gas purchases and official export credits. Robinson worked within that government process, alongside institutions and officials including William J. Casey. His later account presents these measures, the United States extraterritorial controls in the Siberian gas pipeline dispute (1981-1982) and the Saudi oil production increase and price decline (1985-1986) as parts of a campaign that contributed to Soviet collapse. That retrospective causal thesis remains contested among Cold War historians.

Capital-markets leverage

Robinson chaired and vice-chaired the Congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission between 2001 and 2006 and built a second career arguing that US and allied capital markets fund adversary military-industrial systems: screening indices, delisting non-compliant Chinese issuers, and treating pension flows as strategic exposure. Through the Prague Security Studies Institute, which he co-founded and chairs, and his firm RWR Advisory, he pushed "economic and financial statecraft" as a discipline years before the post-2022 mainstreaming of the term.

Significance

Robinson's career links the two great financial-pressure campaigns of the modern era, against Soviet hard currency and against Chinese capital-markets access, and anchors the argument that securities markets are an instrument of Financial warfare.

See also

United States extraterritorial controls in the Siberian gas pipeline dispute (1981-1982) · Ronald Reagan · William Casey · Financial warfare · Saudi oil production increase and price decline (1985-1986) · Economic warfare · Economic statecraft

Sources

• President Ronald Reagan, National Security Decision Directive 66, "East-West Economic Relations and Poland-Related Sanctions" (29 November 1982, declassified).
• Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994).
• Prague Security Studies Institute, "PSSI Staff", record for Roger W. Robinson Jr. (accessed 30 July 2026).