Underground Empire
How America Weaponized the World Economy
by Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman
On sale now (Amazon, Bookshop.org), published by Henry Holt in the US and Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK. Awarded the Council of Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award Bronze Medal. Editors’ Pick, Foreign Affairs Best Books of 2024. See reviews in Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, National Review, Washington Monthly, Financial Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Irish Times, Pluralistic, Publisher’s Weekly, and Chatham House. Translated into Chinese, Finnish, French, Japanese, Korean, and (coming soon) Spanish and Vietnamese.
Featured Work
Essay AI is a technological version of the Homeric songs
Its agents are more than stochastic parrots and stranger than machine gods, write Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi FOR THE GREEKS, an enthusiast was someone inspired by the divine: the Pythian oracle in her frenzy, or Homer invoking the goddess to sing of Achilles’s wrath. Today’s artificial-intelligence enthusiasts predict that the machine gods are coming to transform the world, doing everything that humans can, only better. The faith of these enthusiasts has grown as AI agents solve major open maths problems and hack into other people’s websites, discomfiting sceptics who see AI models as “stochastic parrots”, fit only for fancy spellchecks and a few other ...
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Essay The Chokepoint Trap
How the Search for Economic Security Will End in Geopolitical Calamity Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, and Yeling Tan Policymakers used to ignore chokepoints. Now they have trouble seeing anything else. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration warns allies against dependence on China while it hunts for ways to exploit those allies’ own dependence on the United States—on its market, technologies, financial system, and security umbrella. Beijing, meanwhile, accuses Washington of economic coercion while leveraging its dominance over critical supply chains to press the United States and Europe. More at Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2026 issue.
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EssayPublic Writing Does Silicon Valley Dream of Philip K. Dick?
“Silicon Valley likes to dress its ambitions in the glistening garb of science fiction from the 1950s, when authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke spun tales of humanity spreading through the stars. But what kind of future are we really hurtling towards? Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.” On August 8, 2026, Dan Wang and I wrote the Weekend Essay for the Financial Times.
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Interview The Most Important Foreign Policy Speech in Years
A Conversation with Ezra Klein. “Beneath Carney’s analysis of what is happening is an idea I’ve been following for some time: weaponized interdependence. This idea comes from the international-relations theorists and professors Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in their book “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.” The basic concept is that over time, in this globalized, woven-together world, there are a lot of ways in which being on American technologies and in American financial markets gave the United States leverage. This system was fine for our allies and for the world, as long as we didn’t use that leverage too much. But now ...
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Henry Farrell is the SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology.
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Council Member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, as well as an affiliated scholar at Stanford University Law School’s Center for the Internet and Society, and an international correspondent for Stato e Mercato.
If you want Henry to do something, please read this first.
Substack
Essays
The Research We Need to Understand A.I. Is Falling Apart
By Henry J. Farrell, Alison Gopnik and James Evans The authors are social scientists. The Industrial Revolution was the birthplace of social science as we know it. Entire disciplines such as sociology, political science and economics came into being to analyze enormous social challenges and guide public debate on how to respond. Other social sciences ...
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Crypto is a threat to the US Financial System
With Dan Davies – for the New York Times This has been a good week for America’s crypto interests. The Genius Act, which legitimates a kind of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, advanced in the Senate, and on Thursday, President Trump held a gala dinner for the top 220 holders of his $Trump memecoin. That doesn’t mean ...
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Academic Articles
AI as Governance
Political scientists have had remarkably little to say about artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps because they are dissuaded by its technical complexity and by current debates about whether AI might emulate, outstrip, or replace individual human intelligence. They ought to consider AI in terms of its relationship with governance. Existing large-scale systems of governance such as ...
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Henry Farrell Talks to Kim Stanley Robinson
Henry Farrell and Kim Stanley Robinson (2024), “Henry Farrell Talks to Kim Stanley Robinson,” Vector, 299. Henry Farrell teaches democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer whose most recent novel is The Ministry for the Future. Their conversation took place in March 2023 at Stanford’s Center ...
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Interviews
The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics: Podcast with Max Read and John Ganz
Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. ...
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Interview with Sean Carroll on “Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism”, Mindscape
Sean Carroll’s Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas, Episode 148 | Henry Farrell on Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism Democracy posits the radical idea that political power and legitimacy should ultimately be found in all of the people, rather than a small group of experts or for that matter arbitrarily-chosen hereditary dynasties. Nevertheless, ...
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Interview with Sophie Roell on “The Best Books on the Politics of Information”
“Our political systems evolved in an era when information was much harder to come by. What challenges does our current reality of information overload pose for democracy? How do we even start thinking about these questions? Political scientist Henry Farrell proposes key books for building a curriculum on ‘the politics of information,’ starting with a ...
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Reviews for "Underground Empire"
"a revelatory book"
― Paul Krugman
New York Times
"Farrell and Newman write fluidly and grippingly. . . . As the book jumps from nondescript Northern Virginia office parks housing America’s intelligence establishment, to the boardrooms of mid-20th-century New York banks, to sanctions-dodging tankers traversing the Indian Ocean, it’s not hard to detect the influence of techno-thriller writers such as Neal Stephenson."
The Washington Post
"The book you need to read if you want to understand where the world economy has been and where it may be headed"
― Dani Rodrik
Professor of International Political Economy, Harvard University
Books
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