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 we’ve begun to make that a way we can harm them, a way we can extort them, a way we can control them, and that has really changed the nature of the bargain.”

More at The New York Times.

Other Writing:

Essay

Defending Democratic Mechanisms and Institutions against Disinformation Attacks – with Bruce Schneier

To better understand influence attacks, we proposed an approach that models democracy itself as an information system and explains how democracies are vulnerable to certain forms of information attacks that autocracies naturally resist. Our model combines ideas from both international security and computer security, avoiding the limitations of both in explaining how influence attacks may ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume

Privatization as State Transformation

Privatization is an ambiguous term covering many loosely related phenomena. In this essay, I focus on one specific aspect of privatization-the privatization of governance. This sidesteps arguments about the presumed efficiency gains of, e.g., turning state-owned entities into for-profit corporations, and highlights the political consequences of privatization-how it takes decisions which had once been within ...
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