Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy by Henry Farrell and Abraham NewmanMacMillan Publishers, 2023

Farrell and Newman’s Underground Empire is not a declinist story. Rather, it is the story of the United States having too much power, power channeled through an infrastructure so entwined in the global economy that it has come to be viewed as both natural and invisible. Yet, these instruments of power — payment systems, data cables, regulatory regimes, technological chokepoints — are not neutral or benign. On the contrary: they are coercive, brittle, and susceptible to boomerang effects. As Farrell and Newman argue, the more the United States uses them to control the world economy, the faster it speeds up the corrosion of its own hegemonic order.

This is not a polemic. The authors have no interest in engaging in moral condemnation or indulging in nostalgia for a vanished liberalism. Instead, they offer a forensic, historically grounded account of how America came to rule the world, not just through military might or soft power but through the pipes, wires, and code that power the global economy. Tracing how an “underground empire” has emerged in the post-Cold War decades, they show how U.S.-centered financial networks, digital systems, and supply chains have spread across the world. Ostensibly open and rules-based, these networks were quietly designed to route through American institutions, legal jurisdictions, and corporate platforms.

The book’s key insight is that infrastructure is power — not just material power but informational, regulatory, and strategic power. America’s ability to impose sanctions, monitor global capital flows, restrict technology transfers, or throttle adversaries like Huawei is rooted not in diplomatic persuasion or military deterrence but in the fact that the........

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