Antitrust 5.0: From Market Neutrality to Geoeconomic Statecraft

For more than a century, competition law has rested on a foundational assumption: that markets are essentially neutral spaces and that the principal threat to competitive order originates from private actors. This article challenges that assumption systematically. It advances the thesis that this assumption has never been accurate, and that its doctrinal persistence has rendered competition law analytically incapable of describing the economy it purports to regulate. Drawing on empirical evidenc