Underground empire. How America weaponized the world economy

The United States sits like a spider at the heart of a web of fiber-optic cables and obscure payment systems - a web of surveillance and control that binds the world economy. Todays headlines about trade wars, sanctions, and semiconductor battles are merely surface tremors hinting at greater tensions within. Multinational companies like AT&T and Citigroup once made vast profits by reorganizing the international economy and putting themselves at the center.
After 9/11, America's security state discovered it could weaponize these economic hubs both for espionage and as choke points in the war against terror. Before long, the United States began using these new powers as a matter of course. Now, other countries are pushing back. Slowly but surely. Washington has turned the most vital pathways of the world economy into toots of domination over foreign businesses and countries, whether they are rivals or allies.
allowing the United States to maintain global supremacy. In the process, we have sleepwalked into a new struggle for empire. Using true stories and deeply researched original reporting, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. whose field-defining work on weaponized interdependence forecasted how these seemingly ordinary aspects of the post—Cold War economy have become realms of subterfuge and coercion, reveal what we must do to ensure that this new arms race doesn't spiral out of control.