Navigating Green Industrial Policy in the Superpower Rivalry: Resource Dependency, Strategic Positioning, and Green Industrial Policy

The intensification of superpower rivalry has spurred a surge in protectionist green industrial policies (GIPs). This is notably the case in the transportation sector, where nations increasingly turn to tariffs and local content requirements to protect their domestic EV industries. Yet, despite this global trend, governments differ in the extent to which they engage in protectionist GIPs. Political economists have long focused on domestic factors to explain cross-national policy variation, notably institutional arrangements and economic structures (Hall & Soskice, 2001; Mikler & Harrison, 2012). While these factors are clearly important, they are insufficient to explain why countries with similar national institutions and domestic industries adopt different types of climate and economic strategies (Allan & Nahm, 2025; Breznitz & Gingrich, 2025). In this paper, we explore GIP at the intersection of domestic and international political economies to explain policy variation. Bringing together resource dependence theory with the literature on strategic positioning, we argue that nations’ dependence on superpowers conditions their capacity to advance or resist protectionist GIP. We differentiate between three broad strategies. Strategic ambiguity is a situation in which a state is heavily dependent on two superpowers. Strategic autonomy describes a position in which a country faces relatively little dependence on both superpowers and has room to openly defend its perceived national interest. Strategic alignment refers to a situation in which a country is highly dependent on a single superpower, resulting in close alignment with that superpower’s interests. A key idea is that patterns of economic and security dependence on one or two superpowers shape governments’ perceptions of the costs of defection, which, in turn, shape their choices among strategic ambiguity, alignment, or autonomy in GIP. We develop this argument by comparing four countries – Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and South Korea –which have different positions on tariffs applicable to Chinese EVs, despite similar national institutions (LMEs/CMEs) and similarly sized automotive industries. In Canada, a strong economic dependence on the U.S. limits the country’s ability to engage with China, prompting it to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs. In the UK, dependence on Chinese EVs to meet legally binding climate targets constrains its strategic capacity for autonomous GIP, leading the country to align with China’s economic interests by signaling public opposition to imposing any restrictions on Chinese EVs. In South Korea, high economic dependence on both superpowers makes taking an official position in favor of one side economically costly, and emphasizes a close security alliance with the US without provoking tensions with China. Lastly, France’s relatively low economic dependence on both countries enables greater strategic capacity for autonomous GIP. Our research shows how international political dynamics complement domestic factors in explaining the global rise of GIPs. Therefore, in addition to the trade-offs nations face in aligning climate, economic, and national security objectives (Meckling, 2025; Nahm, 2025), our paper contributes to the geopolitics of GIP by examining how EV tariffs vary with a country’s resource dependence and its strategic positioning for maneuver.