Henry Farrell and Abe Newman on Weaponized Interdependence

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TRANSCRIPT: Paul Krugman in Conversation with Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman

(recorded 9/10/26)

Paul Krugman: So, it’s a world full of choke points. Weaponized interdependence is a term I think coined by Henry Farrell and Abe Newman. Certainly I learned it from them. And there’s a big conference—not including them for some reason—taking place at the European Central Bank a few days after we record this. And so I thought I would talk again with my two favorite international relations people (although now I’m thinking of some friends who will be upset by my saying that.) But anyway, hi guys.

Both: It’s great to be here.

Paul Krugman: There was a seminal 2019 paper by the two of you, and then a book called Underground Empire. Anybody want to tell me what you meant by that? And let’s talk about the history, and then this weirdly more weaponized moment than anyone expected that we’re living in.

Henry Farrell: Maybe I’ll take a first stab at it.

So really, where this came from was that we had finished a long book looking at fights between the United States and European Union over privacy. And as part of that, one of the things we had looked at was the SWIFT system, which is a system which you use when you’re making bank transfers. It’s a messaging system that makes sure that the money gets to the right place, and that everything gets reconciled properly at the end of the day.

And so Abe pointed out after we had finished this, he said, “Well, nobody’s written anything about SWIFT, and there’s something interesting and important with geopolitics going on.” And I was working with a statistical physicist who does a lot of work on networks and network dynamics, and so he thought that we could come up with something on this.

And so we began to write. And we began to figure out that there was something really going on, which I think had been going on in plain sight for a number of years, but which nobody had really been able to put their finger on in such a way that they could actually sort of crystallize what the phenomenon was. And this was what we called “weaponized interdependence.” And the idea behind it was very straightforward. You know, we’ve been living for decades in a highly interdependent global economy, and the ways in which both political economy people in international relations and, I think, most economists had thought about it was in terms of the enormous efficiency advantages that flow from this. Because, if you think about interdependence in terms of trade theory, even in terms of the simple benefits of specialization that Adam Smith talked about a couple of centuries ago, the more interdependence you’re able to use, the better you’re able to achieve various outcomes collectively.

But we began to think about the ways in which this relied upon all of these really boring-seeming networks, such as SWIFT, and the ways in which these networks had increasingly and quietly become a target of international coercion, especially at that stage coming from the United States.

So we argued that if you had two conditions—one, a network which had some degree of centralization, so that there were some kinds of choke points in the network; and secondly, you had some great power which had a means of putting pressure on the actors that were in charge of those choke points—that you would begin to get the conditions where a weaponized interdependence could begin to happen. That is, that that great power could begin to weaponize that choke point against others.