Book Recommendation: Underground Empire. How America Weaponized the World Economy

by Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman

🌍 The internet is global. The rules? Not so much.

📚 Welcome to the plumbing of power. In Underground Empire,

Henry Farrell

and

Abraham Newman

don’t just explain how the US became the spider at the center of the global economic web—they show you the levers, pulleys, and trapdoors Washington uses to control it.

🇺🇸 Their thesis is simple, chilling, and increasingly relevant: America didn’t just globalize the world. It wired it—financially, digitally, and logistically—and now it’s flipping the switch when it suits its strategic aims. The global economy isn’t a flat, frictionless utopia. It’s a rigged circuit board, and the US has root access.

🔎 Need a reality check? Look at how the US strangled Huawei with export controls and cut Russia off from SWIFT. These aren’t ‘sanctions’ in the old-school sense, they’re acts of code-based war.

💸 Farrell and Newman coined the term weaponized interdependence to describe how chokepoints—like the dollar, the cloud, or semiconductor IP—can be used to punish adversaries and police allies. If you're plugged into the global economy, you're on American infrastructure. And if you're on American infrastructure, you're playing by American rules—even if you're in Shanghai, Tehran, or Brussels.

⚙️ And here’s the kicker: the Empire isn’t even fully controlled by the US government. It’s part Beltway, part Big Tech, part Wall Street. Private actors hold the keys to public power. Ever wondered why Amazon Web Services hosts so much of the federal government’s data? Or why TikTok’s fate hinges on a sale to some US firm approved by the Treasury? This is why.

👀 As the world fractures into techno-blocs, US vs China, West vs BRICS—Underground Empire explains the invisible war happening beneath the headlines. It’s less about missiles and more about middleware. And it’s rewriting what power looks like in the 21st century.