The Folly of Decoupling From China – with Abraham Newman

On May 14, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to break the United States’ economic relationship with China. “There are many things we could do,” he told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “We could cut off the whole relationship. Now if you did, what would happen? You’d save $500 billion.” It was Trump’s most extreme anti-China rhetoric to date, but it wasn’t out of step with the mood in Washington. Both Republicans and Democrats agree that China has transformed from a competitor into an adversary, and perhaps even an enemy.

As tensions have mounted as a result of the

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “The Folly of Decoupling From China,” Foreign Affairs (online), June 3, 2020.

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Essay

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and ...
Read Article
Academic Article

Breaking the Path of Institutional Development: Alternatives to the New Determinism in Political Economy

The concept of path dependence is being used in highly deterministic ways in neo-institutionalist analysis, so that studies using this framework have dif.culty in accounting for, or predicting, change. However, the original Polya urn model from which pathdependence theory draws predicts that alternative paths will be possible. It can then be argued that actors will ...
Read Article