The past decade has witnessed a notable reorientation in European Union (EU) external economic policy. Historically anchored in neoliberal principles and a bastion of openness and liberalization, economic and political shocks have led the EU to embrace a range of initiatives reflecting a transition from a market-driven liberal approach to a more assertive outlook on the world. While scholars have been investigating key policies in the geopolitical transition of the EU such as the Anti-Coercion Instrument or the Investment Screening Mechanism, we lack a comprehensive understanding of this shift beyond individual policy areas. To what extent, in which domains, and with which countries do we observe a geopoliticization in EU external economic policy? As a consequence of geopoliticization, the opening and closure of the EU’s external economic boundaries should vary with the security relevance of trade partners and policy domains. More specifically, we expect that countries that are allied with the EU and/or its member states should face lower hurdles in their trade with the EU, and even more so in security-relevant domains such as dual-use goods, FDI, energy, and critical infrastructure investments. To test our expectations on the tightening trade-security nexus in external economic policy, we rely on a novel dataset of EU economic boundary configurations to investigate the extent to which the EU’s reorientation toward assertiveness is reflected in the entry restrictions of goods, services, and investments. Dyadic regression analyses of closure across 42 functional boundaries confirm our expectation on the differential geopoliticization of EU external economic policy.