Weaponized Interdependence and Networked Coercion: A Research Agenda – with Abraham Newman

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence and Networked Coercion: A Research Agenda,” The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence, eds. Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (Brookings Institution 2021).

In May 2018, Donald Trump announced that the United States was pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement on Iran’s nuclear program and reimposing sanctions. Most notably, many of these penalties apply not to U.S. firms, but to foreign firms that may have no presence in the United States. The sanctions are consequential in large part because of U.S. importance to the global financial network.¹ This unilateral action led to protest among the United States’ European allies: France’s finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, for example, tartly noted that the United States was not the “economic policeman of…

Read the full chapter in The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence

Other Writing:

Essay

Our Hackable Political Future The New York Times with Rick Perlstein

Imagine it is the spring of 2019. A bottom-feeding website, perhaps tied to Russia, “surfaces” video of a sex scene starring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand. It is soon debunked as a fake, the product of a user-friendly video application that employs generative adversarial network technology to convincingly swap out one face for another. It is ...
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Essay

Facebook and Falsehood

After the election, many people blamed Facebook for spreading partisan — and largely pro-Trump — “fake news,” like Pope Francis’s endorsement of Trump, or Hillary Clinton’s secret life-threatening illness. The company was assailed for prioritizing user “engagement,” meaning that its algorithms probably favored juicy fake news over other kinds of stories. Those algorithms had taken ...
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