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

What If These Economic Weapons Fall into Trump’s Hands? – with Abraham Newman

The Biden administration has built an unprecedented machine for economic and technological coercion. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its allies cut off Russia’s access to its own central bank reserves held outside Russia. The administration revamped export controls to strangle China’s access to the powerful and specialized semiconductors needed to train A.I., ...
Read Article
Essay

Slaves of Defunct Economists: Why Politicians Pursue Austerity Policies That Never Work

On January 25, the British statistics office announced that the United Kingdom’s economy had shrunk by 0.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012. After enduring two recessions in the last four years, Britain is now well on its way into a third. The pain has been compounded by a succession of austerity budgets, in ...
Read Article