I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
We just like lied to ourselves that security and economic issues were decoupled and that markets were about efficiency and not power.
If the United States wants to restore genuine strategic advantage in the global economy,
it cannot just do this by keeping on building choke point after choke point after choke point.
It has to figure out ways to provide a genuinely attractive vision of how people can work together.
For decades, the United States has used its position at the center of global financial,
commercial, and technological networks to punish adversaries and pressure allies.
exploiting what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call weaponized interdependence.
Lacking any alternatives,
the rest of the world has had no choice but to rely on American payment systems,
American technology, and American corporate might,
even as Washington has turned that reliance to its own strategic advantage.
Now, however, the tables have turned.
Other states, starting with China,
have begun to weaponize their own choke points in the global economic infrastructure.
As Farrell and Newman write in the new issue of Foreign Affairs,
The United States is discovering what it is like to have others do unto it,
as it has eagerly done unto others.
Where it once pioneered the weaponization of interdependence,
Washington may now be increasingly at the mercy of its rivals.