Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman

For most of the modern era, the optimists owned the theory of economic interdependence. From Kant’s Perpetual Peace to Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion to the liberal international-relations scholarship of the late twentieth century, the assumption held that trade and connection pacify — that the more states have to lose from conflict, the less likely they are to fight. A second, more recent version held that globalisation’s networks disperse power, flattening hierarchies and handing influence to markets and individuals over states. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman demolished both ideas with a single concept. The same connections that were supposed to bind the world peacefully, they showed, instead concentrate coercive power in whoever controls the hubs. They called it weaponized interdependence.

It has become one of the most consequential ideas in contemporary strategy — the framework that explains why cutting Russia off from the financial messaging system in 2022 functioned as a weapon rather than a mere sanction, and why control of the semiconductor supply chain confers the power of life and death over a rival’s industries. The phrase, once an academic coinage, is now standard vocabulary in Washington.

The Partnership¶

Henry Farrell is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, a political economist of trust, technology, and democracy who writes prolifically outside the academy. Abraham Newman is Professor of Government in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and director of its Mortara Center, a specialist in European regulation and data governance. Their collaboration runs over more than a decade and several books, including a study of the transatlantic fight over data and surveillance that proved to be the empirical seedbed for their best-known idea.

The two work in the seam between political economy and security — the territory where the wiring of the global economy meets the hard logic of state power. It is precisely the territory that conventional fields tend to miss, because economists treat the plumbing as neutral infrastructure and security scholars treat it as someone else’s department.

From Privacy to Power¶

The route to weaponized interdependence ran through an unglamorous subject: data privacy. In their earlier work on the long transatlantic fight between the European Union and the United States over data and surveillance, Farrell and Newman noticed something that conventional theory could not explain. The dispute was not really about who held the most economic weight; it was about who controlled the channels through which data and money moved — and what they could do to others by virtue of sitting astride those channels. The European fight over American access to financial-messaging data, in particular, revealed a hub that could be used both to watch and to deny. Generalise that observation, and you arrive at the structural theory that made their name: power in a networked economy is not about how much you produce, but about what passes through you.

That intellectual lineage matters, because it explains why their concept is sharper than the usual talk of “economic statecraft.” They were not cataloguing the ways states use money as leverage; they were identifying a specific structural feature of globalisation — the asymmetry of networks — and showing how it converts connection into coercion. It is a theory of topology, not just of policy.

The Idea: Hubs, Panopticons, and Chokepoints¶

The argument, set out in a 2019 article in International Security, begins with a structural observation: global economic networks are not flat. They develop asymmetrically, growing dense clusters around a few hubs — nodes with disproportionate connectivity. The financial system routes through a handful of dollar-clearing institutions; international payments run through the Brussels-based messaging cooperative known as SWIFT; the internet’s traffic flows through a limited set of physical cables and exchange points; critical supply chains funnel through a few irreplaceable firms.

States with legal jurisdiction over those hubs, Farrell and Newman argued, can convert structural centrality into coercive power through two mechanisms. The first is the panopticon effect: a hub is a vantage point, and whoever controls it can watch the flows of money and information passing through — surveillance as a by-product of position. The second is the chokepoint effect: the hub is a valve, and whoever controls it can shut a rival out — denying access to the dollar, to financial messaging, to advanced chips. Weaponisation requires two things: jurisdiction over the node, and domestic institutions willing to use it.

The genius of the concept is that it reframes interdependence itself. The connection is not the opposite of power; it is the power, for whoever sits at the centre. The liberal dream of pacifying commerce and the techno-utopian dream of a borderless internet both rested on a misreading of the same map.

Underground Empire¶

Their 2023 book, Underground Empire, turns the concept into a history of how the United States built — half by accident, half by design — an empire out of the hidden infrastructure of globalisation. The plumbing of the world economy, they argue, happened to centralise in American jurisdiction: the dollar and the banks that clear it, the fibre-optic cables and data centres that carry the world’s information, the intellectual property woven through the entire chip supply chain. After the September 11 attacks, American security agencies began turning these channels into instruments of surveillance and coercion as a matter of counter-terrorism necessity — and then, having discovered how well it worked, as a matter of routine. The result, in their telling, is a country that sleepwalked into a new kind of empire, “a spider at the heart of an international web of surveillance and control.”

The set-piece is the campaign against Huawei, where all the instruments combined: financial surveillance to build the case, dollar-based sanctions to make the arrest, and chip export controls — routed through the chokepoint of advanced fabrication — to cut the company off from the semiconductors it needed. It was, as one admiring reviewer put it, a postmodern war waged through plumbing, and won.

The Blowback Thesis¶

What separates Farrell and Newman from cheerleaders of American economic power is their insistence on the costs. Coercive leverage of this kind, they warn, is a depreciating asset: its power decreases the instant it is used. Every weaponised sanction, every export ban, every extraterritorial fine gives the rest of the world a reason to route around the American system — to build alternatives to the dollar, to diversify away from US banks and US-controlled networks, to pursue the “de-dollarization” and “de-risking” that fragment the very web that gives Washington its leverage.

Their recent work tracks this dynamic as it turns multidirectional. In a series of Foreign Affairs essays they describe the rise of a “new economic security state,” in which national security and economic policy have merged, and warn that the weaponisation game is now reciprocal: China and others have begun wielding their own chokepoints — processed rare earths above all — and the United States is discovering what it is like to have done unto it what it has eagerly done unto others. They have cautioned against substituting tariffs for sanctions and against indiscriminate technological decoupling, on the consistent grounds that overuse degrades the hubs themselves. Farrell has put the polemical version bluntly: the United States is busy eroding the foundations of its own power.

The Critics¶

The dominant critique is one the authors substantially share: that weaponised interdependence is self-defeating, that wielding it accelerates the fragmentation of the system it depends on. A related charge is that Washington reaches for these tools without serious thought about endgames or multilateral legitimacy, courting overreach. Daniel Drezner, who co-edited a volume testing the concept, adds a useful caution against conceptual stretching — the temptation to label everything “weaponised” — and notes that several touted cases underperformed: Russian energy coercion proved uneven, China’s pandemic-supply leverage was exaggerated, and its 2010 rare-earth squeeze on Japan ultimately weakened China’s hand by spurring diversification. The concept is real, in other words, but it is bounded, and it feeds the larger and still-unresolved debate over whether economic coercion actually achieves its aims.

There is also the accountability problem: a country that controls the world’s chokepoints will not always aim them at the guilty, and there is little to restrain it when it errs.

Why They Matter¶

Farrell and Newman gave their era the concept it needed to understand itself. Sanctions, export controls, financial cutoffs, supply-chain security — the entire apparatus of twenty-first-century economic statecraft makes more sense through their lens than through any other. They turned interdependence from a synonym for peace into a map of vulnerability and leverage, and in doing so explained both why the United States has been so powerful and why that power may be eroding through its own use. Their deepest warning is the realist’s oldest one: a weapon used too freely stops being a weapon. The full architecture of the idea is set out in our analysis of weaponized interdependence.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy” (2023) — the book; how the US built an empire from the plumbing of globalisation. (See Recommended Reading below.)

• “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security (2019) — the foundational article that named the concept.

• “The New Economic Security State: How De-Risking Will Remake Geopolitics,” Foreign Affairs (2023) — on the merger of economic and security policy.

• “The Weaponized World Economy,” Foreign Affairs (2025) — on the reciprocal, multidirectional turn and the blowback to American power.

• Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman (eds.), The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence (Brookings, 2021) — the best scholarly framing and critique of the concept.