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.

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Other Writing:

Essay

Spirals of Delusion: How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous – with Abraham Newman and Jeremy Wallace

In policy circles, discussions about artificial intelligence invariably pit China against the United States in a race for technological supremacy. If the key resource is data, then China, with its billion-plus citizens and lax protections against state surveillance, seems destined to win. Kai-Fu Lee, a famous computer scientist, has claimed that data is the new ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume

“The Political Economy of the Internet and E-Commerce,” in Political Economy and the Changing Global Order (third edition) – eds. Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey R.D. Underhill

How have new information technologies affected international political economy? In the heady years of the dot com bubble, many academics and commentators predicted that the Internet and e-commerce would empower private actors and weaken states. Indeed, some libertarians hoped that the Internet would lead to a collapse in state authority. However, these predictions have not ...
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