Are you still seeing that out there?

Let me just – I think – This world that we're talking about, the world of weaponized interdependence, is in many ways very uncomfortable for a lot of policymakers.

And that's kind of where Henry started with the Treasury was not built originally to manipulate markets in order to target coercion.

So first, there's just the level setting of that the bureaucracies were not structured for this purpose.

then you start to add objectives.

So if you think about traditional trade wars, it's often about trying to rebalance trade flows.

But here, we're thinking about objectives.

you're talking about, right?

Acast, acast.com/advertise.

acast.com/advertise.Yeah.

So first of all, I would never say that China is, uh, like absolved of these types of actions.

Of course, China engages in, in economic coercion all the time, and it's partially because its politics is directly linked with its markets.

So it's always thinking about how can it use its markets to advance its interests, and that is it's willing to do that in a, in a coercive and aggressive way.

And, uh, you know, just take Australia, South Korea, Japan, there's endless examples of this.

What China up until very recently has done is what I would call very traditional types of economic coercion.

Is AI emerging as the next tool to be weaponized by governments?

And he says its leaders have little time for either international law or the international rules-based order.

This is really trying to break down the rules-based order, kind of that was based on the liberal principles, where you had states as kind of the organizing unit, and you had rules, which was the way conflict and disputes were settled.

And this is an alternative about hierarchy amongst what we would call the neo-royalists.

You know, I think Trump was very clear in the Greenland conflict, both he, the vice president, and even some senators said, like, if you can't defend your territory, then you have no right to it.

The Trump narrative isn't very different from the machinations of Putin.

Often it's just justified in terms of, I'm the ruler.

as a neo-monarchical ruler, do you extract wealth for yourself and for your clique, your court?

I think the clearest strategy is just protection rackets over and over.

Um, it's a, it's a more complicated, um, uh, landscape than that.

Yeah.

Well, thanks, Jeff, for the kind words about the article.

Um, you know, I think Stacie and I wrote this because we were...

And I think every, hopefully your listeners would agree that, like, we're at a once in a, like, a 100-year transformation in the international system.

We all grew up with this liberal international order.

I think most of us understand that that's in decay.

Or whether the more ideological forces in, in, in the new right, uh, would, would constrain those personalized instincts much more.

But if the international liberal order is somewhat behind us, and we don't want neo-royalism, the question then becomes... what is a counter narrative or a different narrative that we should be advancing?

Yeah, so I think the first thing is exactly what you said.

This isn't about any one leader.

This is definitely not just a story about Trump.

You know, people, Trump makes it so obvious what is happening, at least in Stacey and my read.

But this is basically, you know, a tale as old as time of aristocratic interests.

you know, there's a group of insider economic elites that see equality, egalitarianism as eroding their position in the system.

It's still a different system than one where you don't get to say anything or one where you're completely irrelevant and the power is entirely concentrated in the hands of you.

... one of the biggest contributors to Donald Trump and to Marco Rubio, purchased Citgo, the American subsidiary of the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, just two months ago for six billion dollars, which now looks like a Filene's Basement bargain.

You know, it's fortuitous timing for him because Citgo, they're one of the few people that can process this oil that comes out of Venezuela that is less easy to refine.

The thing that's very interesting is, like, the amount of money that would come out of this in the short term in barrels of oil sold, it's not gonna be a remarkable amount for the US consumer, but it is going to flow into the hands of the Trump administration, and particularly Donald Trump.

At least, his truths that he's been putting out say he will control something like fifty million barrels of oil that the government will immediately give him.

At market price, it's over two billion.

This oil is not as good as US oil, so maybe it's half that.

It's still about what a presidential campaign would cost, and so what our argument is, is that everybody says, "Well, this doesn't make any sense because of the oil." Well, it doesn't make sense from a national interest stance.

None of it is really about anything except enabling Trump to amass enough resources that he can reward his friends and punish his enemies.

Describe what the Chinese government did to develop these, these sources of leverage, and what is the kind of Chinese way of interdependence? I mean, Henry started to allude to this, but, um, China seems to have kind of refined approaches that perhaps started in Washington.

I mean, I wanted to start by saying I think all of this just shows the lack of planning and how important interactions are between great powers.

So this is not from the beginning some US plan to dominate global infrastructures, and also I think we have to be very careful about thinking about China as, like, you know, all seeing, all knowing about how these interactions are gonna play out.

And at least in our book, one of the (laughs) things that we are continually just shocked by is how key actors talk about the lack of downstream thinking, about what are the consequences of using these tools.

So we have this one quote in Underground Empire where an interviewee talks about, "What would this button do sanctions?"And it's just kind of the lack of thinking about, you know, yes, they can see, like, would it cut off supplies of key elements to an adversary? But then what is the adversary gonna do in response? And that's in sanctions and export controls, you know, the lack of that.

And what we, together with some co-author, Yeling Tan and Mark Dallas, what we show in a- a paper that was in International Studies Quarterly, we show when the US starts to use coercion, both in surveillance, in the case of the Snowden revelations, and in choke points, in the case of Huawei and the ZTE coercive efforts, that what you see in China is a movement in a set of bureaucracies to elevate self-sufficiency as opposed to kind of interdependence as the kind of strategy in technology spaces.

And I don't think this is rocket science.

lucky.Let's broaden that question to world order, as Abe you alluded to this earlier, what is a world order that is driven by weaponized interdependence, uh, used by all actors? And so you think about what that order might look like, what the kind of key questions we should be asking now are? As we understand that order, what are you focused on?