Thread by @henryfarrell

1. amzn.to/2MILMpM Today's the launch date for The Uses And Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence, which @dandrezner @ANewman_forward and I have co-edited. This is, for better or worse, a timely book - the issues that we all talk about are core problems in global politics

2. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Take this @business piece by @NickWadhams that came out yesterday - it describes how the US-China rivalry is focused on fights over technology more than traditional military confrontation.

3. Wadham's piece is based on conversations with U.S. sources, who emphasize China's threat. The people he talked to describe "a sense that China has essentially forced the U.S. to start breaking off elements of business and technology relations in a pattern known as decoupling."

4. More generally, they suggest that China has "shown a willingness to use the size of its market and its economic might as a weapon to make other nations fall into line." All that is right - China has ruthlessly weaponized market access to punish states such as China and Norway.

5. But it is only one part of the story. The United States has done much the same thing on a much larger scale. Rather than just denying businesses or countries access to its internal market, it has denied them access to the machineries that allow global markets to work.

6. This is the story of U.S. secondary sanctions which squeezed Iran out of the global financial system. It is also the story of what the U.S. has done to Huawei - starting by denying it access to U.S. sourced semiconductors and other supplies, but escalating by denying access

7. to semiconductors and other products made with U.S. intellectual property, or using U.S. chip design software, while putting relentless pressure on non-U.S. companies to cut ties with Huawei, so that it can't find the semiconductors it needs anywhere.

8. Put differently - China has ruthlessly used the tools that it has (a big market) to coerce others, while the U.S. has deployed a much more extensive set of financial and economic tools to coerce China and other rivals and adversaries.

9. In order to prevent Huawei from building out a global network that could then offer China new opportunities for pressure and control, the U.S. has deployed the vast network resources at its own disposal to cut Huawei off from global suppliers.

10. This is the kind of battle we discuss in the book. We explain how China weaponizes its national market, but the U.S. weaponizes the interdependent system that the global economy depends upon, and how the two strategies have different reach and different implications.

11. This presents a key set of policy challenges for the U.S. As Dan says in the Post today - washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/0… - the U.S. used to think that it could use these tools unilaterally. Now it has to worry about how China - and even its allies in the U.S. - may respond

11. and what kinds of vulnerabilities they might exploit in retaliation. Furthermore, the U.S. - and everyone else - have to worry that they live in a world economy where everything is linked through networks and everything depends on everything else, but no-one has good maps.

12. This can mean that actions have unexpected consequences. U.S. measures led Huawei and other companies to hoard semiconductors - this is reportedly one of the reasons why there is a global shortage, seriously hurting the U.S. car industry and other businesses that need chips.

13. And we don't have any good understanding of how far these kinds of actions can be pushed. What are the mutual vulnerabilities? At what point might businesses - and countries - abandon global networks that have become sources of risk and uncertainty?

14. Might these regulatory pressures lead actors to move to alternative decentralized networks? That's an argument that @VitalikButerin , the inventor of Ethereum ,has been making for a long time - but is suddenly relevant in new ways -

15. These are the kinds of questions that Dan, Abe and I and the other contributors to the book raise - and the answers to those questions are going to reshape economic and security policy over the next decades.

16. We're happy to have helped get the ball rolling - we are looking forward to seeing what others make of the book (which has plenty of lively disagreements in it, and will surely, we hope provoke many more, as all of us try to figure out the world we're tumbling into). Finis.

(allies in the "E.U." that should be ...)