“Panopticons and Chokepoints,” an interview with Richard Byrne

A new view of international relations puts global networks – and how they can be weaponized – at its center. What’s the future of regulation in this new landscape?

“The debate we see at the moment is never going to be about trade and open markets in the same kind of way anymore,” says Farrell. “Once the door has been opened to thinking about these things in terms of their consequences for security, different actors will enter into the scene and begin to gobble up this policy area that you think is defined in these terms, and start redefining in it in very different ways indeed…. We’re not going back to where we were – and once you’ve opened up the door to these kinds of concerns, they are going to metastasize through the entire system.

Access the full interview at the Wilson Quarterly

Other Writing:

Essay

The Twilight of America’s Financial Empire – with Abraham Newman

When Iraqi lawmakers voted to expel U.S. forces from the country earlier this month, the Trump administration’s response was swift and forceful: it refused to withdraw and, for good measure, threatened financial retaliation, saying it would freeze Iraq’s accounts at the U.S. Federal Reserve. The threat seems to have been effective. Although Iraqi officials still ...
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Essay

When Politics Drives Scholarship – with Steve Teles

The publication of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, a history of the “public choice” economist James Buchanan and his impact on American politics, has led to an enormous, highly charged debate. But as Marshall Steinbaum correctly noted in this journal, not many people have weighed in who aren’t either Team Public Choice or Team Anti-Buchanan. ...
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