Open Questions | Trump’s neo‑royalist world order and ‘weaponised interdependence’: Abraham Newman
American political scientist on how ‘interdependence’ can be exploited as part of the rivalry between major powers
You talk about an “age of weaponised interdependence”. Why do you say that? Why has it become so central today?
Many people have a caricature in their head of how globalisation works: we created all these global economic networks, which create so many actors that power gets decentralised. Because of that great power conflicts are over and instead, firms are in control of this very decentralised world.
But we [Newman and his co-author Henry Farrell] argue that it’s the wrong image of what has happened in globalisation.
If you think about these networks, whether it’s finance, communication or production, they’re highly centralised in the international economy. Take the iPhone. It’s made either by a chip from TSMC or Samsung. If you make a global financial transaction, it goes through a handful of banks. And the phone itself is dependent on either Apple or Google for the operating system. That kind of centralisation is not a flat world. It’s a centralised one.
States have taken advantage of that. They use that for coercion, either by monitoring and surveilling adversaries or by cutting them out of key networks. So the age of weaponised interdependence is basically the shift from what you might call neo-liberal high globalisation to a world where markets are not just about efficiency but also about vulnerability.