The new imperialism

Below I'm providing excerpts from  Henry Farrell and Abraham
Newman's just-out essay in *The National Interest *on the dangers of modern
imperialism. I'm sending to classicists partly because it opens with a
comparison with ancient imperialism that may make the essay inviting for
classroom use.

These guys are smart. They're summing up a lot, and careful review will be
necessary.  But they succinctly portray a new world, in which nations are
increasingly "interdependent" (crucial word for ancient economic
historians), to such a point that national security is more at risk than
had been imagined.  So, possibly of interest. Comments welcome.

Dan

America’s Misuse of Its Financial Infrastructure
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnationalinterest.org%2Ffeature%2Famerica%25E2%2580%2599s-misuse-its-financial-infrastructure-52707&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C74bc24b596364a8cff2508d6c38a01bb%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C1%7C636911394840167130&sdata=bduA8oDYCra2MufeEoQr6MWFAW0B3FvetvFIpligCyo%3D&reserved=0

Henry Farrell
Abraham Newman

April 2019


THREE DECADES ago, a German history professor listed 210 proposed
explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire. The remarkable array
included such fanciful causes as Bolshevism, public baths, hedonism, the
pressure of terrorism and, most famously, lead poisoning.

The last explanation has been discredited. It is highly unlikely that lead
water pipes caused the empire to collapse … [But] exploded theories can
point towards important truths. Like classical Rome, *America’s empire
today depends less on pomp than on plumbing*. Instead of roads, aqueducts
and seaports, it relies on pipelines conveying financial flows and torrents
of data, as well as vast distributed supply chains. These look like a
global public infrastructure, but can readily be redirected to private
national strategic advantage. America’s domination of obscure, seeming
technical structures is generating its own forms of hubristic folly among
imperial administrators, who have begun to think that there is nothing they
cannot do with it.

TO CHART the empires of antiquity you simply mapped the cities, rivers and
roads through which power flowed. Today’s international economy has a far
more complex topography that encompasses both the physical and the digital
[with] an intricate global tangle of conduits. These started to coalesce
into their current configuration a quarter of a century ago, at a moment
when the world economy appeared to be secure from empire’s grasp.
The early 1990s seemed the beginning of a new and simpler world where the
law of kings had been displaced by the lex mercatoria. … it appeared that
bitter international disputes over the ordering of the economy were giving
way to the complete victory of the free market. … Quinn Slobodian describes
how *neoliberals had long desired the victory of “dominium”—a global order
based on property rights, free global and national exchange—over
“imperium”*—the
power of national states to control property, block financial flows, and
harness markets for strategic ends. In the 1990s, it appeared that *imperium
was being beaten back inside the bounds of national borders. …*

In this new era, businesses not only sought to grow and bestride the world,
but to remake it in their own image. The great banks and financial
corporations aggressively built international capital markets….
This new world, like its self-appointed prophet Thomas Friedman, described
itself through a garble of metaphors for flatness, openness and
all-conquering market forces. *U.S. policymakers believed that illiberal
states could be tamed by free information and economic openness*, welcoming
China into the World Trade Organization….

These vast new flows of money, information and manufacturing components
required the construction of a correspondingly vast infrastructure…. These
infrastructural systems at first appeared to be technical, dull and
apolitical…. This new order  [b]y *mapping and organizing the world for
business, however, ... accidentally made it more vulnerable to state power.*

… Global supply chains, pursuing Adam Smith’s economic logic of
specialization, often relied on a tiny number of key suppliers for crucial
and difficult to manufacture components, so that a fire in a single factory
could bring entire industries to a near standstill.

*This did not just transform economies; it transformed international*
* security. *

… America’s secret empire—its power over the global infrastructures that
support flows of finance, information and components—could only be
maintained so long as it was not overused. *Unilateral actions that
threaten the interests of other powerful states will lead them to react. *Some
will respond, as China did, through self-help; building their own surplus
capacities to strengthen themselves against foreign manipulation. Russia is
building up reserves in gold and yuan as barricades against further
international financial coercion. Others, like the EU, may not be hunkering
down but building out.
…
the United States itself will withdraw from some aspects of global
interdependence as it realizes how communal plumbing endangers its own
security. [Note] the recent alarm over the Chinese communications firm
Huawei
…
These pressures and counter-pressures are only going to get worse. The
United States, its allies and its major adversaries are beginning to
confront a very difficult truth.* The backbone networks of the modern
globalized economy have become major national security issues. *