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地下帝国：美国如何武器化世界经济
Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
作者：亨利·法雷尔、亚伯拉罕·纽曼，2023 年 9 月 12 日
一项深入研究的调查揭示了美国如何像蜘蛛一样处于国际监视和控制网络的中心，并以光纤电缆和模糊的支付系统等全球网络的形式编织该网络
美国安全国家在 9/11 事件后首次开始将这些渠道武器化，当时它们似乎是打击恐怖主义的必需品，但现在它们已成为理所当然的事情。 AT&T 和花旗集团等跨国公司建立枢纽，它们用来赚钱，但政府也可以将其部署为咽喉要道。 今天有关贸易战、制裁和技术争端的头条新闻只是暗示着表面之下更大的地震变化。
华盛顿缓慢但坚定地把世界经济最重要的路径变成了统治外国企业和国家的工具，无论它们是竞争对手还是盟友，从而使美国能够维持全球霸主地位。 在这个过程中，我们梦游般地进入了一场新的帝国斗争。 亨利·法雷尔和亚伯拉罕·纽曼利用真实的故事、领域定义的发现和原创报道，展示了冷战后经济中最普通的方面如何成为诡计和胁迫的领域，以及我们必须采取哪些措施来确保这种新武器 种族不会失控。
地下帝国：美国如何武器化世界经济
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840554
亨利·法雷尔和亚伯拉罕·纽曼。
根据这篇深刻的揭露，对信息、金钱和技术的控制赋予了美国傲慢的全球影响力。 政治学家法雷尔（《武器化信任的使用和滥用》）和纽曼（《隐私保护者》）揭示了美国如何利用用于拨打手机或电汇资金的国际基础设施来欺凌外国和私营公司。 这些基础设施包括承载全球互联网流量的光纤电缆，其中大部分实际上跨越美国领土，可供国家安全局使用； 国际银行支付系统 SWIFT，向美国泄露全球经济交易信息； 美国的制裁法规剥夺了该国对手的市场和技术，例如2022年，美国迫使台湾半导体制造商台积电拒绝向中国电信巨头华为提供先进芯片，从而阻止了中国建立的5G互联网网络全球帝国。 作者以清晰易懂的散文写作，追溯了美国经济武器的增长及其现代部署，这些武器有时是微妙和狡猾的，有时是生硬和盗版的。 （2019 年，一名国务院官员威胁一名驾驶满载伊朗石油的油轮的船长，如果他不改变航向，将受到个人制裁。）其结果是对网络世界所引发的权力游戏的令人着迷且令人不安的审视。 （九月）
Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
https://www.amazon.ca/Underground-Empire-America-Weaponized-Economy/dp/1250840554
By Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman， Sept. 12 2023
A deeply researched investigation that reveals how the United States is like a spider at the heart of an international web of surveillance and control, which it weaves in the form of globe-spanning networks such as fiber optic cables and obscure payment systems
America’s security state first started to weaponize these channels after 9/11, when they seemed like necessities to combat terrorism―but now they’re a matter of course. Multinational companies like AT&T and Citicorp build hubs, which they use to make money, but which the government can also deploy as choke points. Today’s headlines about trade wars, sanctions, and technology disputes are merely tremors hinting at far greater seismic shifts beneath the surface.
Slowly but surely, Washington has turned the most vital pathways of the world economy into tools of domination over foreign businesses and countries, whether they are rivals or allies, allowing the U.S. to maintain global supremacy. In the process, we have sleepwalked into a new struggle for empire. Using true stories, field-defining findings, and original reporting, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman show how the most ordinary aspects of the post–Cold War economy have become realms of subterfuge and coercion, and what we must do to ensure that this new arms race doesn’t spiral out of control.
Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World’s Economy
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman.
评论：美国对全球经济的意外控制
https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2023-10/review-americas-accidental-control-global-economy?
《地下帝国》认为，由于美国安装了世界金融体系的管道，它必须表现出克制——尼尔·希林写道，这是不可能的。
作者：Neil Shearing 副研究员，2023 年 9 月 29 日
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地下帝国：美国如何武器化世界经济
亨利·法雷尔和亚伯拉罕·纽曼，艾伦·莱恩，25英镑
乌克兰战争在多个战线上进行。 其中一个在前线，双方似乎都已陷入僵局，血腥的僵局迫在眉睫。 另一个问题深藏在连接全球经济的技术和金融网络的地下深处。 在这方面，美国的支持意味着天平压倒性地向有利于乌克兰的方向倾斜。
--- 作者认为，美国并没有寻求建立一个它可以控制的全球体系
两位美国学者亨利·法雷尔和亚伯拉罕·纽曼在一本重要的新书中讲述了美国如何主宰连接世界的金融和技术网络以及这些网络如何被武器化的故事。 阅读他们的书有几个原因：它易于理解、引人入胜且简洁得令人耳目一新。 但最重要的是，它们触及了权力在全球化经济中如何真正发挥作用的核心。
法雷尔和纽曼论点的核心是，美国的影响力源于其对全球经济管道的控制，即本书标题中的“地下帝国”。 这部分是财务方面的，部分是技术方面的。 外汇市场上几乎 90% 的交易都是以美元进行的。 与此同时，美国的技术霸主地位意味着国家之间的通信流往往通过美国境内的基础设施进行。
法雷尔和纽曼认为，美国并没有有意寻求建立一个它可以控制的全球体系，这在我看来是正确的。 相反，美国恰好是 20 世纪 90 年代和 2000 年代的世界主导经济体，当时全球化和技术的结合推动了贸易、资本和信息的跨境流动的爆炸式增长。 尽管如此，华盛顿的政策制定者正在越来越多地利用这一立场。
——有人认为，美国金融霸权的时代已经结束。 有几个理由对此表示怀疑
俄罗斯对乌克兰战争的反应就说明了这一点。 在美国对俄罗斯采取的所有措施中，最痛苦的是对其银行的制裁。 这些限制了美国银行与俄罗斯银行乃至俄罗斯公司进行交易的能力。 由于所有美元结算都会在某种程度上触及美国金融体系，这使得俄罗斯公司更难以美元进行交易。 鉴于美元在全球经济体系中的主导地位，这对他们来说是一个问题。
作为回应，美国的对手越来越多地提倡使用本国货币来结算跨境交易。 最重要的是中国推动扩大人民币在双边贸易中的使用。 这些努力导致一些评论家认为美国金融霸权的时代已经结束。 但正如我为查塔姆研究所所写的那样，有几个理由对此表示怀疑。
一是任何取代美元的货币都需要具有类似的属性：它必须得到强大而稳定的机构的支持，并由运营开放资本账户的央行发行。 这将阻止人民币的使用规模足以与美元相抗衡。
但另一个问题是，书中概述的强大网络效应将使其他货币难以取代美元。 因此，虽然越来越多的对华双边贸易将以人民币结算，但绝大多数跨境交易将继续以美元结算 — — 而美国将继续为全球金融体系提供管道。 同样，很难想象一个美国不在促进大多数通信流动方面发挥重要作用的世界。
---美国可以部署其帝国来建立一个联邦，其中权力和合法性相互加强，作者：亨利·法雷尔和亚伯拉罕·纽曼
这是什么意思呢？ 法雷尔和纽曼认为，随着中国和俄罗斯寻求摆脱美国主导的体系的束缚，世界将变得更加脱节和日益敌对。 因此，他们认为美国政策制定者必须后退一步，用他们的话说，认识到“权力越大，责任越大”。 他们写道，“美国可以部署其帝国来建立一个联邦，在这个联邦中，权力和合法性相互加强。”
但目前尚不清楚这在实践中意味着什么，除了值得称赞的多边主义和美国以更积极的方式利用其影响力（例如打击全球逃税）。
更根本的是，我认为这误读了形势。 尽管美国政策制定者可能并没有打算建立一个他们可以施加这种控制的全球体系，但运气和环境结合起来给他们带来这种控制的事实在华盛顿并不是不受欢迎的。
图片 — 2009 年，雅加达的一位反债务活动家。在 20 世纪 90 年代和 2000 年代的全球化和科技繁荣时期，美国有幸成为世界主导经济体。 照片：Bay Ismoyo/法新社/盖蒂图片社。
美国的国际角色
20世纪90年代和2000年代的全球化时代已经被扔进了历史的垃圾箱。 全球经济非但没有一体化，反而分裂成两个阵营——一个与美国结盟，另一个与中国结盟，其中包括俄罗斯，还包括非洲和拉丁美洲的大部分地区。
在这个新世界中，美元的主导地位已成为巨大权力和影响力的源泉，华盛顿的政策制定者将发现越来越难以抵制其利用。
Review: America's accidental control of the global economy
'Underground Empire' argues that because America installed the plumbing of the world's financial system, it must show restraint – that is unlikely, writes Neil Shearing.
By Neil Shearing Associate Fellow,
Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Allen Lane, £25
The war in Ukraine is being fought on several fronts. One is on the frontline, where both sides appear to have dug in and a bloody stalemate looms. Another lies deep underground in the tangle of technological and financial networks that connect the global economy. On this front, United States backing means the scales are tilted overwhelmingly in Ukraine’s favour.
--- The authors argue that America did not seek to create a global system that it could control
The story of how the US came to dominate the financial and technological networks that connect the world – and how they are now being weaponized – is told in an important new book by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, two US academics. There are several reasons to read their book: it is accessible, it is engaging and it is refreshingly concise. But most of all, they get to the heart of how power really works in a globalized economy.
The core of Farell and Newman’s argument is that US influence stems from its control over the plumbing for the global economy, the ‘underground empire’ of the book’s title. This is part financial and part technological. Almost 90 per cent of transactions in the foreign exchange market take place in dollars. At the same time, American tech supremacy means that communication flows between countries tend to be routed through infrastructure that sits on US soil.
Farrell and Newman argue, correctly in my view, that America did not intentionally seek to create a global system that it could control. Rather, it just happened that the US was the world’s dominant economy in the 1990s and 2000s when globalization and technology combined to fuel an explosion in cross-border flows of trade, capital and information. Nonetheless, it is a position that is being increasingly exploited by policymakers in Washington.
--- Some argue that the days of US financial hegemony are over. There are several reasons to doubt this
The response to Russia’s war in Ukraine illustrates this point. Of all the measures imposed by the US on Russia, the most painful have been the sanctions on its banks. These have restricted the ability of US banks to transact with Russian banks, and by extension Russian companies. And since all US dollar settlements touch the US financial system at some point, this has made it much harder for Russian companies to deal in dollars. That’s a problem for them given the dominance of the dollar in the global economic system.
In response, adversaries of the US are increasingly promoting the use of their own currencies to settle cross-border transactions. The most important has been China’s push to expand the use of renminbi in bilateral trade. These efforts have led some commentators to argue that the days of US financial hegemony are over. But as I have written for Chatham House, there are several reasons to doubt this.
One is that any currency that replaces the dollar would need to share similar attributes: it would have to be backed by strong and stable institutions, and be issued by a central bank that operated an open capital account. This will prevent the use of the renminbi on a scale sufficient to rival the dollar.
But another is that the strong network effects outlined in the book will make it hard for other currencies to dislodge the dollar. Accordingly, while a growing share of bilateral trade with China will be settled in renminbi, the vast majority of cross-border transactions will continue to be settled in dollars – and the US will continue to provide the plumbing for the global financial system. Similarly, it is difficult to envisage a world in which the US does not play a major role in facilitating most communication flows.
--- America could deploy its empire to build a commonwealth, in which power and legitimacy reinforce each other, By Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman
What does all this mean? Farrell and Newman argue that as China and Russia seek to untether themselves from the US-dominated system, the world will become more disconnected and increasingly hostile. Accordingly, they argue that US policymakers must step back and, in their words, recognize that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. ‘The United States could deploy its empire to build a commonwealth, in which power and legitimacy reinforce each other,’ they write.
But it is not clear what this amounts to in practice, other than a laudable pitch for multilateralism and for America to use its influence in more positive ways, such as tackling global tax evasion.
More fundamentally, I think this misreads the situation. While US policymakers may not have set out to create a global system over which they exert such control, the fact that luck and circumstance combined to give it to them has not been unwelcome in Washington.
The era of globalization that defined the 1990s and 2000s has been consigned to history’s dustbin. Rather than integrating, the global economy is now fracturing into two blocs – one that aligns with the US and another that aligns with China, which includes Russia but also large parts of Africa and Latin America.
In this new world, the dominance of the dollar has become the source of huge power and influence that policymakers in Washington will find increasingly difficult to resist exploiting.
地下帝国：美国如何武器化世界经济
1.全球化并不是我们想象的那样。
几十年来，有一个关于全球化如何运作的流行故事。 托马斯·弗里德曼的书《世界是平的》可能很容易识别这一点。 这是全球化去中心化的形象，公司和企业处于领先地位。 在这个世界上，国家已经被削弱、被推到一边，而公司则建立了遍布世界的网络来开展商业、赚钱和增加财富。
然而，公司和公司去中心化网络的想法实际上只是一个神话。 在全球经济的许多核心领域，只有少数公司占据主导地位，无论是苹果公司生产的 iPhone、台湾半导体制造商台积电生产的 iPhone 芯片，还是通过这些公司进行的金融交易 电话，通常仅通过全球经济中的几家银行进行。 这些核心公司造成了我们认为的全球经济瓶颈。 他们集中市场是为了主宰市场并获取租金。 现在，各国政府正在意识到这一点。
2. 各国政府，最重要的是美国政府，正在了解这种全球化结构，并利用它来进行斗争。
在过去的几十年里，从9/11恐怖袭击开始，美国政府开始思考如何管理一个全球市场对他们不利的世界，恐怖分子利用这些全球市场来袭击他们的祖国。 许多不同的机构并没有依赖现有的计划，而是争先恐后地理解这场危机，并引入新的工具来解决这些问题。
在国家安全局、财政部等机构中，他们发现了全球经济中可以利用的地图、系统和结构。 最重要的是，他们可以利用这些地图来揭示我们的敌人是如何运作的，监视他们并了解他们的内部运作。 然后他们就可以瞄准他们。 它们常常被阻止或排除在全球经济之外。
“他们可以利用这些地图来揭示我们的敌人是如何运作的，监视他们并了解他们的内部运作。”
这项努力的重要标志之一是比利时的 Swift 组织。 它基本上就像银行的后台邮局，银行之间相互共享有关正在进行哪些交易及其原因的信息。 美国政府开始利用全球金融体系的这一中心点，首先了解恐怖分子在做什么，然后了解伊朗或朝鲜等对手在做什么。 然后它开始将这些国家排除在这个体系之外。 这只是各国政府利用这些咽喉要道观察敌人或试图扼杀敌人的努力的开始。
3. 全球经济已成为战场，企业需要做好准备。
以前，当企业考虑政治风险时，他们的解决方案是去一个遥远的国家，担心他们的投资可能被政府拿走，或者被国有化。 因此，此前，企业主要担心的是东道国政府。
现在，企业面临着一种新型的政治风险和新的担忧，而这正是它们参与全球市场的渠道。 制造系统遍布各国的生产网络造成了新形式的政治风险，我们在新冠危机期间看到了如此突出的风险。
而且，他们使用的系统或网络已经成为这种政治风险的渠道，无论是信息技术还是金融架构。 德意志银行、台积电或苹果等公司越来越成为步兵。 政府呼吁他们采取行动并进行战斗。 因此，现在企业必须面对一个问题：他们在这个新世界中做什么，以及他们在这样做时如何保护自己的商业模式？
4. 各国对全球经济基础设施的使用并不是一个重大的总体计划，而是偶然发生的。
为什么这很重要？ 原因是这是出于危机反应，是对 9/11 的反应。 随着政府面临新的危机、伊朗或朝鲜等国家的核威胁，以及俄罗斯对乌克兰的入侵，它的规模不断扩大。
“这些新经济武器的升级有可能破坏全球经济以及我们所知的全球化。”
在这些关键时刻，政府抓住了这些新工具并以此为基础，但没有时间真正考虑后果。 那么使用这些工具意味着什么呢？ 这对我们的对手意味着什么？ 这对我们的朋友意味着什么，对全球经济意味着什么？ 我们认为可能的天花板已经成为新的地板。 这些新经济武器的升级有可能破坏全球经济以及我们所知的全球化。 我们担心的是，正如升级战略一样，我们可能会看到全球化的分裂，许多国家可能会后退。 这些国家可能会更多地审视自己，可能不再参与为全球社区带来如此多财富和繁荣的全球市场。
5. 除非我们创造一种能够维持稳定的新语言，否则全球化本身可能面临风险。
当核武器出现时，它们并没有附带规则手册。 人们不知道如何负责任地使用它们或确保它们不会导致意外后果。 为此，学者和政策制定者聚集在一起，开发了一种新的语言和系统，以防止使用此类大规模杀伤性武器。 像相互确保毁灭（MAD）这样的东西必须被发明。 它现在是核时代运作方式的基石。
但一开始，人们并不知道规则手册是什么。 我们现在正处于类似的时刻，我们需要一套新的指导方针、护栏和工具来了解何时应该使用这些工具以及使用它们的风险是什么。 最重要的是，我们需要向政策制定者提供这些想法，以便他们能够以负责任的方式使用制裁、出口管制、投资审查和其他经济武器来保障我们的安全。
这些经济武器还可以用来让世界变得更美好、更安全。 我们注意到的领域之一是气候变化。 你可以想象一下，利用制裁等一些工具来促进我们未来的可持续发展的地球，让我们所有人都能在未来生活和繁荣。
要收听合著者 Abraham Newman 朗读的音频版本，请立即下载 Next Big Idea 应用程序：
Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
1. Globalization is not what we thought it was.
For several decades there was a popular story about how globalization worked. It’s probably easily recognizable by Thomas Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat. It’s an image of globalization being decentralized, with companies and firms in the lead. In this world, states have been neutered, pushed to the sides, and companies have built world-spanning networks to conduct commerce, make money, and grow wealth.
The idea of decentralized network of firms and companies, however, is really just a myth. In many of the core areas of the global economy, just a few companies dominate, whether it’s your iPhone being produced by Apple, the chip on that iPhone made by TSMC, a semiconductor maker in Taiwan, or the financial transactions that you make over that phone, which are often made through just a few banks in the global economy. These core companies have created what we think of as choke points in the global economy. They’ve centralized markets in order to dominate them and to extract rents. Now, governments are waking up to that.
2. Governments, most importantly the United States government, are understanding this globalized structure and they’re using that to fight their battles.
Over the last several decades, starting with the terrorist attacks in 9/11, the U.S. government started to think about how they could manage a world where global markets had been turned against them, where terrorists had used these global markets to attack their homeland. Rather than relying on an existing plan, a bunch of different agencies scrambled to make sense of this crisis and bring in new tools to solve these problems.
In agencies like the National Security Agency, the Treasury Department, and others, they discovered maps, systems, and structures in the global economy that they could use to their advantage. Most importantly, they could use these maps to uncover how our enemies were working, to surveil them and understand their inner workings. They could then target them. Often, they were blocked or excluded from the global economy.
“They could use these maps to uncover how our enemies were working, to surveil them and understand their inner workings.”
One of the critical symbols of this effort was the organization Swift in Belgium. It’s basically like a back-office post office for banks, where banks share information with each other about which transactions are being conducted and why. The U.S. government started to use this central point in the global financial system to understand first what terrorists were doing, then what adversaries like Iran or North Korea were doing. It then started to cut these countries out of this system. This was just the beginning of an effort by governments to either use these choke points to observe their enemies or to try to strangle them.
3. The global economy has become a battlefield and firms need to prepare.
Formerly, when companies thought about political risk, their solution was to go to a country far away, fearing that their investment might get taken by the government, or nationalized. So previously, firms’ main worry was their host government.
Now there’s a new type of political risk, a new concern that firms face, which are the very channels they use to engage in global markets. Production networks spreading out manufacturing system across countries has created new forms of political risk, ones that we saw so prominently during the COVID crisis.
Moreover, the systems or networks that they use have become the channels of this political risk, whether it’s information technology or financial architectures. Firms like Deutsche Bank, TSMC, or Apple are increasingly the foot soldiers. They are being called upon by governments in order to act and to fight their battles. So now companies have to face a question: What do they do in this new world and how do they protect their business model as they do it?
4. The use of these infrastructures of the global economy by states wasn’t a big overarching orchestrated plan, but really came about by accident.
Why is that important? The reason is that this came out of a crisis response, a response to 9/11. It then grew as the government faced new crises, nuclear threats by countries like Iran or North Korea, and then the invasion by Russia of Ukraine.
“The ratcheting up of these new economic weapons has the potential to undermine the global economy, and globalization as we know it.”
At these key moments, government grabbed for these new tools and built upon them, but there hasn’t been the time to really think about the consequences. So what does it mean to use these tools? What does it mean for our adversaries? What will it mean for our friends and what might it mean for the global economy? The ceiling of what we thought was possible has become the new floor. The ratcheting up of these new economic weapons has the potential to undermine the global economy, and globalization as we know it. Our concern is that, as in a strategy of escalation, we could see a fragmentation in globalization and many countries might pull back. These countries might look more into themselves and may no longer engage in the global markets that have brought so much wealth and prosperity to communities across the globe.
5. Globalization itself could be put at risk unless we create a new language that will maintain stability.
When nuclear weapons came on the scene, they didn’t come with a rule book. People didn’t know how to use them responsibly or to make sure that they wouldn’t lead to unanticipated consequences. To do that, scholars and policymakers got together and developed a new language and systems to prevent these kinds of weapons of mass destruction from being used. Things like mutually assured destruction (MAD) had to be invented. It’s now a cornerstone of how the nuclear age works.
But at the beginning, people didn’t know what the rule book was. We are now at a similar moment, when we need a new set of guidelines, guardrails, tools to understand when these tools should be used and what the risks are of using them. Most importantly, we need to give policymakers these ideas so that they can use sanctions, export controls, investment screening, and other economic weapons in a responsible way that guarantees our safety.
These economic weapons can also be used to make the world a better and safer place. One of the areas that we note is in the case of climate change. You could imagine turning some of these tools like sanctions in order to promote our future sustainable planet, one in which we can all live and prosper in the future.
To listen to the audio version read by co-author Abraham Newman, download the Next Big Idea App today:
亨利·法雷尔教授
Henry Farrell 是约翰·霍普金斯大学高级国际研究学院 SNF Agora 研究所教授、曾担任乔治华盛顿大学和多伦多大学的教授、伍德罗·威尔逊国际学者中心的研究员以及德国波恩马克斯·普朗克项目组的高级研究员。研究主题包括民主、互联网政治以及国际和比较政治经济学。 著有《信任的政治经济学：利益、机构和企业间合作》 2009 ，《隐私与权力：跨大西洋的自由与安全之战》 2019，还撰写或合着了 34 篇学术文章，以及多部书籍章节和大量非学术出版物。 他是外交关系委员会的成员。
亚伯拉罕·纽曼教授
Abraham L. Newman 是乔治城大学埃德蒙·A·沃尔什外交学院政府学和埃德蒙·A·沃尔什外交学院教授。 他是莫塔拉国际研究中心主任。 他的研究重点是全球化产生的政治，是《隐私与权力：跨大西洋自由与安全斗争》2019，《自愿中断：国际软法、金融和权力》2018，《隐私保护者：全球经济中的个人数据监管》2008 ，《数字革命如何革命性》2006。 作品发表在一系列期刊《比较政治研究》、《国际组织》、《国际安全》、《科学》和《世界政治》。
Professor Henry Farrell
Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 2019 winner of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology, and Editor in Chief of the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post. He has previously been a professor at George Washington University and the University of Toronto, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and a senior research fellow at the Max-Planck Project Group in Bonn, Germany. He works on a variety of topics, including democracy, the politics of the Internet and international and comparative political economy. His first book, The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation, was published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press. His second (with Abraham Newman) Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security, was published in 2019 by Princeton University Press, and has been awarded the 2019 Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize and the ISA-ICOMM Best Book Award. In addition he has authored or co-authored 34 academic articles, as well as several book chapters and numerous non-academic publications. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Abraham Newman
Abraham L. Newman is professor of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the Director of the Mortara Center for International Studies. His research focuses on the politics generated by globalization and is the co-author Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security (Princeton University Press 2019), which was the winner of the 2019 Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize, the 2020 International Studies Association ICOMM Best Book Award, and one of Foreign Affairs’ Best Books of 2019, co-author of Voluntary Disruptions: International Soft Law, Finance and Power (Oxford University Press 2018), author of Protectors of Privacy: Regulating Personal Data in the Global Economy (Cornell University Press 2008) and the co-editor of How Revolutionary was the Digital Revolution (Stanford University Press 2006). His work has appeared in a range of journals including Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, International Security, Science, and World Politics.
Review
"A revelatory book."
―Paul Krugman, The New York Times
"The U.S. has made use of a novel, often mysterious set of tools for rewarding those who help it and punishing those who cross it. That set of tools is now a bit less mysterious, thanks to Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. Their book Underground Empire reveals how the U.S. benefits from a set of institutions built up late last century as neutral means of streamlining global markets."
―Christopher Caldwell, The New York Times
“Farrell and Newman’s book is like an MRI or CT scan of recent world history, giving us a new and startling image of the global body politic, as clear as an X-ray. Cognitive mapping takes on a new aspect with their analysis, as they shift from the technological to the historical, showing both how this new nervous system of world power came to be, and how it could be put to better use than it is now. Given the intertwined complexities of our very dangerous polycrisis, we need their insights.”
―Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future
“Underground Empire is an astonishing explanation of how power really works. From fiber optic cables to the financial system, Farrell and Newman show how the networks that knit us together are also powerful coercive tools, providing a subtle and revelatory account of how the United States learned to weaponize its dominance of the world order’s plumbing. A riveting read, essential for understanding how economic and technological power is wielded today.”
―Chris Miller, author of Chip War
“An eye-opening journey into the hidden networks that power the high-tech world, where all roads lead not to Silicon Valley but to suburban Washington DC, bankers and spies matter as much as tech entrepreneurs, and an industry built by the Cold War has become a geopolitical battleground once again. A truly important book to explain―and move beyond―our tumultuous times.”
―Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code
“The sharpest and most striking analysis I’ve seen in years of the state the world’s in, cunningly disguised as a user-friendly business book.”
―Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill
“Underground Empire tells a riveting story about the deep forces that have shaped our present moment. The book is a portrait not of a single protagonist or event, but rather a system that shapes much of the world today: a web of dollars and data that has, half accidentally, given the United States a new kind of geopolitical control over both its enemies and allies. It is history written in its most powerful form: a view of the recent past that gives us a new lens to better discern our future.”
―Steven Johnson, author of How We Got to Now
If you want to understand where the world economy has been and where it may be headed, you need to read this book.
―Dani Rodrik, author of The Globalization Paradox
"Like an iceberg, most of the power and almost all the mechanisms of economic coercion are below the surface, in the very infrastructure that undergirds international commerce. . . . Underground Empire should rightly stimulate much discussion."
―Wesley K. Clark, The Washington Monthly
"The publication of Underground Empire could not be more timely. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman offer an important corrective to a dominant narrative in US foreign policy circles that positions the US and other Western governments as innocent by-standers, caught off-guard by their main rivals."
―Times Literary Supplement
"Farrell and Newman set out a compelling thesis, defend it well, and tell a fascinating tale. And when they finish, they leave you with a way to make sense of things that seem senseless and terrible. This may not make those things less terrible, but at least they're comprehensible."
―Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother
"Farrell and Newman write fluidly and grippingly. . . . As the book jumps from nondescript Northern Virginia office parks housing America’s intelligence establishment, to the boardrooms of mid-20th-century New York banks, to sanctions-dodging tankers traversing the Indian Ocean, it’s not hard to detect the influence of techno-thriller writers such as Neal Stephenson."
―The Washington Post
"Farrell and Newman describe the rise over the past 50 years of what they call America’s 'network imperialism.' In an era where markets were supposedly becoming ever-more disembedded from states, the authors show that the opposite was the case.... The vision one leaves their book with is one of great-power conflict where, as usual, those at the bottom of the world’s hierarchy of wealth continue to suffer the most, with no refuge in sight."
―Quinn Slobodian, The New Statesman
"Captivating. . . . A gripping account."
―Financial Times
