Henry Farrell

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 seethe over a U.S. drone strike that killed a top Iranian commander in Baghdad on January 3, Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi has said that his caretaker government lacks the authority to push for a U.S. withdrawal, and American troops have

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “The Twilight of America’s Financial Empire,” Foreign Affairs (online), January 24, 2020.

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

The Consequences of the Internet for Politics

March 8, 2012 Annual Review of Political Science 15:35-52.
Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the ...
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Interview

The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics: Podcast with Max Read and John Ganz

February 27, 2025 John Ganz Max Read
Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. ...
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