Henry Farrell

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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In September 2019, two months before officially taking office, the new European Commission president was already insisting that the European Union needed to change. On the one hand, Ursula von der Leyen promised a new “geopolitical Commission,” but on the other, she wanted the EU “to be the guardian of multilateralism.” The difficult question was ...
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Essay

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January 17, 2018 Cato Unbound.
Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles’ essay – and the book that lies behind it – are part of a broader liberaltarian challenge. Liberaltarianism, as I understand it, looks to use classical liberalism as a set of foundations for a very different understanding of market and state than libertarianism. Rather than starting from the market order ...
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