Henry Farrell e Abraham Newman
 |
| Ibrahim Rayintakath |
HENRY FARRELL é Professor de Relações Internacionais do Instituto Agora da Fundação Stavros Niarchos na Universidade Johns Hopkins.
ABRAHAM NEWMAN é titular da Cátedra John Powers em Diplomacia Empresarial Internacional na Escola de Serviço Exterior e Professor do Departamento de Governo da Universidade de Georgetown.
Eles são os autores de Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
Quando Washington anunciou um "acordo-quadro" com a China em junho, marcou uma mudança silenciosa de rumo na economia política global. Este não foi o início da era imaginada pelo presidente dos EUA, Donald Trump, de "libertação" sob a grandeza unilateral americana, nem um retorno ao sonho do governo Biden de rivalidade entre grandes potências. Em vez disso, foi o verdadeiro início da era da interdependência armada, na qual os Estados Unidos estão descobrindo como é ter outros fazendo com eles o que eles avidamente fizeram com outros.
Esta nova era será moldada por armas de coerção econômica e tecnológica — sanções, ataques à cadeia de suprimentos e medidas de exportação — que redirecionam os muitos pontos de controle na infraestrutura que sustenta a economia global interdependente. Por mais de duas décadas, os Estados Unidos têm usado unilateralmente esses pontos de estrangulamento em finanças, fluxos de informação e tecnologia para obter vantagem estratégica. Mas as trocas de mercado tornaram-se irremediavelmente entrelaçadas com a segurança nacional, e os Estados Unidos agora precisam defender seus interesses em um mundo no qual outras potências podem alavancar seus próprios pontos de estrangulamento.
É por isso que o governo Trump teve que fazer um acordo com a China. Autoridades do governo agora reconhecem que fizeram concessões nos controles de exportação de semicondutores em troca da flexibilização das restrições da China sobre minerais de terras raras que estavam prejudicando a indústria automobilística dos Estados Unidos. Empresas americanas que fornecem software para design de chips, como Synopsys e Cadence, podem mais uma vez vender sua tecnologia na China. Essa concessão ajudará a indústria chinesa de semicondutores a se livrar do impasse em que se viu quando o governo Biden começou a limitar a capacidade da China de construir semicondutores avançados. E a empresa americana Nvidia pode novamente vender chips H20 para treinamento de inteligência artificial para clientes chineses.
Em um discurso pouco noticiado em junho, o Secretário de Estado Marco Rubio insinuou o raciocínio do governo. A China havia "monopolizado o mercado" de terras raras, colocando os Estados Unidos e o mundo em uma "crise", disse ele. A administração percebeu que “a nossa capacidade industrial é profundamente dependente de uma série de potenciais Estados-nação adversários, incluindo a China, que podem impor-nos o seu poder”, alterando a “natureza da geopolítica” num “dos grandes desafios do novo século”.
Embora Rubio tenha enfatizado a autossuficiência como solução, a pressa do governo em fechar um acordo demonstra os limites de agir sozinho. Os Estados Unidos estão reduzindo suas próprias ameaças para persuadir adversários a não prejudicar partes vitais da economia americana. Outras potências também estão lutando para descobrir como promover seus interesses em um mundo em que o poder econômico e a segurança nacional estão se fundindo, e a integração econômica e tecnológica deixou de ser uma promessa para se tornar uma ameaça.
Washington teve que refazer seu estado de segurança nacional depois que outros países desenvolveram a bomba atômica; de forma semelhante, terá que reconstruir seu estado de segurança econômica para um mundo em que adversários e aliados também possam usar a interdependência como arma. Em suma, as armas econômicas estão proliferando assim como as armas nucleares, criando novos dilemas para os Estados Unidos e outras potências. A China se adaptou a esse novo mundo com notável rapidez; outras potências, como os países europeus, têm enfrentado dificuldades. Todos terão que atualizar seu pensamento estratégico sobre como suas próprias doutrinas e capacidades se cruzam com as doutrinas e capacidades de outras potências, e como as empresas, que têm seus próprios interesses e capacidades, responderão.
O problema para os Estados Unidos é que o governo Trump está esvaziando os próprios recursos de que necessita para promover os interesses americanos e se proteger contra contra-ataques. Na era nuclear, os Estados Unidos fizeram investimentos históricos em instituições, infraestrutura e sistemas de armas que os impulsionariam a uma vantagem de longo prazo. Agora, o governo Trump parece estar minando ativamente essas fontes de força. À medida que o governo se confronta com os chineses, está destruindo os sistemas de expertise necessários para navegar pelas complexas compensações que enfrenta. Cada governo é forçado a construir o avião enquanto voa, mas este é o primeiro a retirar peças aleatórias do motor a 30.000 pés de altitude.
À medida que a China se adapta rapidamente às novas realidades da interdependência armamentista, está construindo seu próprio "conjunto" alternativo de indústrias de alta tecnologia que se reforçam mutuamente, centradas na economia energética. A Europa está em dificuldades no momento, mas, com o tempo, também poderá criar seu próprio conjunto alternativo de tecnologias. Os Estados Unidos, de forma singular, estão desperdiçando suas vantagens institucionais e tecnológicas. A incapacidade de Washington de atender às mudanças no sistema internacional não só prejudicará os interesses nacionais dos EUA, como também ameaçará a saúde a longo prazo das empresas americanas e a subsistência dos cidadãos americanos.
A TASTE OF YOUR OWN MEDICINE
The weapons of interdependence have been proliferating for several years and are now being deployed to counter U.S. power. As China and the European Union began to understand their risks, they, too, tried to shore up their own vulnerabilities and perhaps take advantage of the vulnerabilities of others. For these great powers, as for the United States, simply identifying key economic chokepoints is not enough. It is also necessary to build the state apparatus that can gather sufficient information to grasp the immediate benefits and risks and then put that information to use. China’s approach is coming to fruition as it presses on the United States’ vulnerabilities to force it to the negotiating table. By contrast, Europe’s internal institutional weaknesses force it to vacillate, putting it in a dangerous position vis-à-vis the United States and China.
For China, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s 2013 exposure of U.S. surveillance practices demonstrated both the reach of the United States and the mechanics of the new era. Previously, Beijing had viewed technological independence as an important long-term goal. After Snowden, it saw dependence on U.S. technology as an urgent short-term threat. As our work with the political scientists Yeling Tan and Mark Dallas has shown, articles in Chinese state media began to trumpet the crucial role of “information security” and “data sovereignty” to China’s national security.
The real wake-up call came when the first Trump administration threatened to cut off ZTE, a major Chinese telecommunications company, from access to U.S. technology and then weaponized export controls against Huawei, which the administration had come to see as an urgent threat to U.S. tech dominance and national security. Chinese state media began to focus on the risks posed by “chokepoints” and the need for “self-reliance.”
Washington tem se concentrado mais em pensar na melhor forma de usar essas armas do que em quando elas não devem ser usadas. Outros países têm se mostrado dispostos a confiar na infraestrutura tecnológica e financeira dos EUA, apesar dos riscos, porque viam os Estados Unidos como um governo cujo interesse próprio era limitado, pelo menos em certa medida, pelo Estado de Direito e pela disposição de considerar os interesses de seus aliados. Esse cálculo mudou, provavelmente de forma irreversível, à medida que o segundo governo Trump deixou claro que vê os países com os quais os Estados Unidos historicamente estiveram mais próximos menos como aliados do que como Estados vassalos. Sem limites claros e aplicáveis à coerção dos EUA, as empresas multinacionais mais dominantes sediadas nos EUA, como Google e J.P. Morgan, se verão presas na terra de ninguém de uma nova zona de guerra, recebendo fogo de todos os lados. À medida que os países trabalham para se isolar da coerção dos EUA (e da infraestrutura americana), os mercados globais estão passando por profunda fragmentação e fratura. Há "uma crescente aceitação da fragmentação" na economia global, alertou o ex-secretário do Tesouro Larry Summers, e "talvez ainda mais preocupante — acho que há uma sensação crescente de que o nosso pode não ser o melhor fragmento para se associar".
Isso, por sua vez, sugere uma lição mais profunda. Os Estados Unidos se beneficiaram de sua capacidade de transformar a interdependência em uma arma ao longo do último quarto de século. Desfrutaram das vantagens de uma economia internacional baseada em instituições multilaterais e um regime tecnológico construído em torno de sua autoimagem de potência liberal, mesmo agindo de forma unilateral e, às vezes, antiliberal para proteger seus interesses como bem entendessem. Há apenas um ano, alguns intelectuais e formuladores de políticas americanos esperavam que esse sistema pudesse sobreviver por tempo indeterminado, para que a força coercitiva unilateral dos EUA e os valores liberais continuassem a andar de mãos dadas.
Isso agora parece extremamente improvável. Os Estados Unidos enfrentam uma escolha: um mundo em que a coerção agressiva americana e o declínio hegemônico dos EUA se reforçam mutuamente, ou um mundo em que Washington se realinha com outros países de mentalidade liberal, renunciando ao abuso de seus poderes unilaterais. Não faz muito tempo, autoridades americanas e muitos intelectuais percebiam a era da interdependência armamentista e a era da hegemonia americana como uma só. Tais premissas agora parecem ultrapassadas, à medida que outros países também obtêm essas armas. Assim como na era nuclear, os Estados Unidos precisam abandonar o unilateralismo e adotar a détente e o controle de armas, e, talvez a longo prazo, reconstruir uma economia global interdependente sobre bases mais sólidas. Não fazê-lo colocará em risco tanto a segurança quanto a prosperidade americanas.
É por isso que o governo Trump teve que fazer um acordo com a China. Autoridades do governo agora reconhecem que fizeram concessões nos controles de exportação de semicondutores em troca da flexibilização das restrições da China sobre minerais de terras raras que estavam prejudicando a indústria automobilística dos Estados Unidos. Empresas americanas que fornecem software para design de chips, como Synopsys e Cadence, podem mais uma vez vender sua tecnologia na China. Essa concessão ajudará a indústria chinesa de semicondutores a se livrar do impasse em que se viu quando o governo Biden começou a limitar a capacidade da China de construir semicondutores avançados. E a empresa americana Nvidia pode novamente vender chips H20 para treinamento de inteligência artificial para clientes chineses.
Em um discurso pouco noticiado em junho, o Secretário de Estado Marco Rubio insinuou o raciocínio do governo. A China havia "monopolizado o mercado" de terras raras, colocando os Estados Unidos e o mundo em uma "crise", disse ele. A administração percebeu que “a nossa capacidade industrial é profundamente dependente de uma série de potenciais Estados-nação adversários, incluindo a China, que podem impor-nos o seu poder”, alterando a “natureza da geopolítica” num “dos grandes desafios do novo século”.
Embora Rubio tenha enfatizado a autossuficiência como solução, a pressa do governo em fechar um acordo demonstra os limites de agir sozinho. Os Estados Unidos estão reduzindo suas próprias ameaças para persuadir adversários a não prejudicar partes vitais da economia americana. Outras potências também estão lutando para descobrir como promover seus interesses em um mundo em que o poder econômico e a segurança nacional estão se fundindo, e a integração econômica e tecnológica deixou de ser uma promessa para se tornar uma ameaça.
Washington teve que refazer seu estado de segurança nacional depois que outros países desenvolveram a bomba atômica; de forma semelhante, terá que reconstruir seu estado de segurança econômica para um mundo em que adversários e aliados também possam usar a interdependência como arma. Em suma, as armas econômicas estão proliferando assim como as armas nucleares, criando novos dilemas para os Estados Unidos e outras potências. A China se adaptou a esse novo mundo com notável rapidez; outras potências, como os países europeus, têm enfrentado dificuldades. Todos terão que atualizar seu pensamento estratégico sobre como suas próprias doutrinas e capacidades se cruzam com as doutrinas e capacidades de outras potências, e como as empresas, que têm seus próprios interesses e capacidades, responderão.
O problema para os Estados Unidos é que o governo Trump está esvaziando os próprios recursos de que necessita para promover os interesses americanos e se proteger contra contra-ataques. Na era nuclear, os Estados Unidos fizeram investimentos históricos em instituições, infraestrutura e sistemas de armas que os impulsionariam a uma vantagem de longo prazo. Agora, o governo Trump parece estar minando ativamente essas fontes de força. À medida que o governo se confronta com os chineses, está destruindo os sistemas de expertise necessários para navegar pelas complexas compensações que enfrenta. Cada governo é forçado a construir o avião enquanto voa, mas este é o primeiro a retirar peças aleatórias do motor a 30.000 pés de altitude.
À medida que a China se adapta rapidamente às novas realidades da interdependência armamentista, está construindo seu próprio "conjunto" alternativo de indústrias de alta tecnologia que se reforçam mutuamente, centradas na economia energética. A Europa está em dificuldades no momento, mas, com o tempo, também poderá criar seu próprio conjunto alternativo de tecnologias. Os Estados Unidos, de forma singular, estão desperdiçando suas vantagens institucionais e tecnológicas. A incapacidade de Washington de atender às mudanças no sistema internacional não só prejudicará os interesses nacionais dos EUA, como também ameaçará a saúde a longo prazo das empresas americanas e a subsistência dos cidadãos americanos.
A GLOBALIZAÇÃO MUNDIAL CRIOU
A interdependência armamentista é um subproduto inesperado da grande era da globalização que está chegando ao fim. Após o fim da Guerra Fria, as empresas construíram uma economia global interdependente sobre a infraestrutura centrada nos EUA. As plataformas tecnológicas dos Estados Unidos — a internet, o comércio eletrônico e, posteriormente, as mídias sociais — entrelaçaram os sistemas de comunicação do mundo. Os sistemas financeiros globais também se uniram graças à compensação em dólar, na qual as empresas usam direta ou indiretamente dólares americanos para negócios internacionais; aos bancos correspondentes que implementam essas transações; e à rede de mensagens financeiras SWIFT. A fabricação de semicondutores centrada nos EUA foi desmembrada em uma miríade de processos especializados na Europa e na Ásia, mas a propriedade intelectual essencial, como o design de software para semicondutores, permaneceu nas mãos de algumas empresas americanas. Cada um desses sistemas poderia ser entendido como sua própria "pilha", complexos interconectados de tecnologias e serviços relacionados que se reforçavam mutuamente, de modo que, por exemplo, investir na internet aberta significava cada vez mais investir também em plataformas e sistemas de comércio eletrônico dos EUA. Numa época em que a geopolítica parecia matéria de thrillers antiquados da Guerra Fria, poucos se preocupavam em se tornar dependentes da infraestrutura econômica fornecida por outros países.
Isso foi um erro dos adversários de Washington e, eventualmente, também de seus aliados. Após os ataques de 11 de setembro de 2001, os Estados Unidos começaram a usar esses sistemas para perseguir terroristas e seus apoiadores. Ao longo de duas décadas de experimentação cumulativa, as autoridades americanas expandiram suas ambições e alcance. Os Estados Unidos passaram da exploração de gargalos financeiros contra terroristas para a implementação de sanções contra bancos e, com o tempo, para a exclusão de países inteiros, como o Irã, do sistema financeiro global. A internet se transformou em um aparato global de vigilância, permitindo que os Estados Unidos exigissem que plataformas e empresas de busca, regulamentadas por autoridades americanas, entregassem informações estratégicas cruciais sobre seus usuários em todo o mundo.
A infraestrutura da interdependência econômica voltou-se contra os inimigos e amigos dos Estados Unidos. Quando o primeiro governo Trump se retirou do Plano de Ação Integral Conjunto (JBA), que os Estados Unidos e outros países importantes, inclusive europeus, haviam negociado com o Irã em 2015 para limitar seu programa nuclear, os Estados Unidos ameaçaram sancionar os europeus que continuassem a fazer negócios com a República Islâmica. Os governos europeus se viram em grande parte incapazes de proteger suas próprias empresas contra o poder dos EUA.
Foi nesse contexto que escrevemos pela primeira vez sobre interdependência como arma, em 2019. Naquela época, muitas das redes econômicas mais importantes que sustentam a globalização — comunicações, finanças, produção — haviam se tornado tão centralizadas que um pequeno número de empresas e atores econômicos importantes as controlavam efetivamente. Os governos que pudessem exercer autoridade sobre essas empresas, principalmente o governo dos EUA, poderiam recorrer a elas para obter informações sobre seus adversários ou excluir rivais do acesso a esses pontos vitais da economia global. Ao longo de duas décadas, os Estados Unidos construíram instituições para afirmar e direcionar essa autoridade em resposta a uma série de crises específicas.
Alguns altos funcionários de Trump encontraram nossa pesquisa acadêmica e, para nossa surpresa, gostaram do que viram. De acordo com o livro de 2022 do historiador Chris Miller, "Chip War", quando o governo quis pressionar ainda mais a fabricante chinesa de telecomunicações Huawei, um alto funcionário aproveitou a ideia da interdependência armada como um manual para fortalecer os controles de exportação contra semicondutores, descrevendo o conceito como uma "coisa linda".
As armas econômicas estão proliferando, assim como as armas nucleares.
Nosso objetivo principal, no entanto, era expor o lado negativo dessa militarização. O mundo que a globalização criou não era a paisagem plana de competição pacífica de mercado que seus defensores haviam prometido. Em vez disso, estava repleto de hierarquia, relações de poder e vulnerabilidades estratégicas.
Além disso, era fundamentalmente instável. As ações americanas provocariam reações por parte dos alvos e contra-ataques por parte dos Estados Unidos. As maiores potências poderiam jogar na ofensiva, buscando vulnerabilidades que elas também pudessem explorar. Potências menores poderiam buscar canais de troca menos responsáveis ou transparentes, efetivamente criando espaços obscuros na economia global. Quanto mais os Estados Unidos voltassem suas interconexões contra seus adversários, maior a probabilidade de que esses adversários — e até mesmo aliados — se desconectassem, se escondessem ou retaliassem. À medida que outros transformassem a interdependência em arma, o tecido de conexão da economia global seria refeito de acordo com uma nova lógica, criando um mundo baseado mais na ofensiva e na defesa do que no interesse comercial comum.
O presidente dos EUA, Joe Biden, também utilizou a militarização como uma ferramenta cotidiana de política. Seu governo elevou os controles de exportação de semicondutores de Trump a um novo patamar, aplicando-os primeiro contra a Rússia, a fim de enfraquecer o programa de armas de Moscou, e depois contra a China, negando a Pequim o acesso aos semicondutores de ponta necessários para treinar com eficiência os sistemas de inteligência artificial. De acordo com o The Washington Post, um documento redigido por funcionários do governo Biden, com o objetivo de limitar o uso de sanções a problemas urgentes de segurança nacional, reduziu-se inexoravelmente de 40 para oito páginas de recomendações ineficazes. Um ex-funcionário reclamou de um "sistema implacável, interminável, no qual é preciso sancionar a todos e a seus semelhantes..." que estava "fora de controle".
Preocupações semelhantes atormentavam os controles de exportação. Especialistas em políticas públicas alertaram que as restrições tecnológicas incentivaram a China a escapar do controle dos Estados Unidos e desenvolver seu próprio ecossistema de tecnologias avançadas. Isso não impediu o governo Biden, que em suas últimas semanas anunciou um plano extraordinariamente ambicioso para dividir o mundo inteiro em três partes: os Estados Unidos e alguns de seus amigos mais próximos como uma elite escolhida, a grande maioria dos países no meio e um pequeno número de adversários ferrenhos na base da pirâmide. Por meio de controles de exportação, os Estados Unidos e seus parceiros próximos manteriam o acesso tanto aos semicondutores usados para treinar a poderosa IA quanto aos "pesos" mais recentes — os motores matemáticos que impulsionam os modelos de fronteira —, negando-os aos adversários americanos e forçando a maioria dos países a aderir a restrições gerais. Se isso funcionasse, garantiria uma vantagem americana de longo prazo em IA.
Embora o governo Trump tenha abandonado esse grande plano mestre tecnocrático, certamente não abandonou o objetivo de domínio e controle dos EUA sobre os pontos de estrangulamento. O problema para os Estados Unidos é que outros não estão de braços cruzados. Em vez disso, estão construindo os meios econômicos e institucionais para resistir.
A TASTE OF YOUR OWN MEDICINE
The weapons of interdependence have been proliferating for several years and are now being deployed to counter U.S. power. As China and the European Union began to understand their risks, they, too, tried to shore up their own vulnerabilities and perhaps take advantage of the vulnerabilities of others. For these great powers, as for the United States, simply identifying key economic chokepoints is not enough. It is also necessary to build the state apparatus that can gather sufficient information to grasp the immediate benefits and risks and then put that information to use. China’s approach is coming to fruition as it presses on the United States’ vulnerabilities to force it to the negotiating table. By contrast, Europe’s internal institutional weaknesses force it to vacillate, putting it in a dangerous position vis-à-vis the United States and China.
For China, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s 2013 exposure of U.S. surveillance practices demonstrated both the reach of the United States and the mechanics of the new era. Previously, Beijing had viewed technological independence as an important long-term goal. After Snowden, it saw dependence on U.S. technology as an urgent short-term threat. As our work with the political scientists Yeling Tan and Mark Dallas has shown, articles in Chinese state media began to trumpet the crucial role of “information security” and “data sovereignty” to China’s national security.
The real wake-up call came when the first Trump administration threatened to cut off ZTE, a major Chinese telecommunications company, from access to U.S. technology and then weaponized export controls against Huawei, which the administration had come to see as an urgent threat to U.S. tech dominance and national security. Chinese state media began to focus on the risks posed by “chokepoints” and the need for “self-reliance.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressing media in Brussels, June 2025
Yves Herman / Reuters
Yves Herman / Reuters
These fears translated into policy actions as the Chinese Communist Party developed a “whole-of-nation system” to secure China’s technological independence, calling for “breakthroughs in major ‘chokepoint’ technologies and products.” China also began to think about how it could better exploit its advantages in rare-earth mining and processing, where it had gained a stranglehold as U.S. and other companies fell out of the market. China’s power in this sector comes not from a simple monopoly over the minerals, which the country doesn’t fully possess, but from its domination of the economic and technological ecosystem necessary to extract and process them. Notably, these critical minerals are used for a variety of high-tech industrial purposes, including producing the specialized magnets that are crucial to cars, planes, and other sophisticated technologies.
China had already threatened to cut back its rare-earth supply to Japan during a 2010 territorial dispute, but it lacked the means to exploit this chokepoint systematically. After it woke up to the threat of the United States’ exploitation of chokepoints, China stole a page from the American playbook. In 2020, Beijing put in place an export control law that repurposed the basic elements of the U.S. system. This was followed in 2024 by new regulations restricting the export of dual-use items. In short order, China built a bureaucratic apparatus to turn chokepoints into practical leverage. China also realized that in a world of weaponized interdependence, power comes not from possessing substitutable commodities but from controlling the technological stack. Just as the United States restricted the export of chip manufacturing equipment and software, China forbade the export of equipment necessary to process rare earths. These complex regulatory systems provide China not only with greater control but also with crucial information about who is buying what, allowing it to target other countries’ pain points with greater finesse.
This is why American and European manufacturers found themselves in a bind this June. China did not use its new export control system simply to retaliate against Trump but to squeeze Europe and discourage it from siding with the United States. German car manufacturers such as Mercedes and BMW worried as much as their U.S. competitors that their production lines would grind to a halt without specialized magnets. When the United States and China first reached a provisional deal, Trump announced on Truth Social that “FULL MAGNETS, AND ANY NECESSARY RARE EARTHS, WILL BE SUPPLIED, UP FRONT, BY CHINA,” recognizing the urgency of the threat to the U.S. economy. China’s long-term problem is that its state is too powerful and too willing to intervene in the domestic economy for purely political purposes, hampering investment and potentially strangling innovation. Still, in the short term, it has built the critical capacity to reimpose controls as it deems necessary to resist further U.S. demands.
ALL TALK
Whether Europe can withstand pressure from Beijing—and, for that matter, from Washington—remains an open question. Europe has many of the capacities of a geoeconomic superpower but lacks the institutional machinery to make use of them. The SWIFT system, after all, is based in Belgium, as is Euroclear, the settlement infrastructure for many euro-based assets. European companies—including the Dutch semiconductor lithography giant ASML, the German enterprise software firm SAP, and the Swedish 5G provider Ericsson—occupy key chokepoints in technology stacks. The European single market is by some measures the second largest in the world, potentially allowing it to squeeze companies that want to sell goods to European businesses and consumers.
But that would require Europe to build its own comprehensive suite of institutions and independent stack of technologies. That is unlikely to happen in the short to medium term, unless the nascent “EuroStack” project, which aims to secure Europe from foreign interference by building an independent information technology base, really takes off. Even though Europe woke up to the danger of weaponized interdependence during the first Trump administration, it quickly fell back asleep.
In fairness, the EU’s weaknesses also reflect its unique circumstances: it depends on an outside military patron. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has heightened Europe’s short-term dependence on the United States, even as European countries struggle to bolster their defensive capacities. The Biden administration put a friendly gloss on economic coercion, coordinating with European governments such as the Netherlands to limit exports of ASML’s machinery to China. At the same time, the United States provided Europe with the detailed intelligence that it needed to wield financial sanctions and export controls against Russia, obviating the need for Europe to develop its own abilities.
Europe’s lassitude is heightened by internal divisions. When China imposed a series of export restrictions on Lithuania to punish it for its political support of Taiwan in 2021, German companies pressed the Lithuanian government to de-escalate. Again and again, Europe’s response to the threat of Chinese economic coercion has been kneecapped by European companies desperate to maintain their access to Chinese markets. At the same time, measures to increase economic security are repeatedly watered down by EU member states or qualified by trade missions to Beijing, which are full of senior officials eager to make deals.
Rubio meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, July 2025
Mandel Ngan / Reuters
Most profoundly, Europe finds it nearly impossible to act coherently on economic security because its countries jealously retain individual control over national security, whereas the EU as a whole manages trade and key aspects of market regulation. There are many highly competent officials scattered throughout the European Commission’s trade directorate and the national capitals of member states but few ways for them to coordinate on large-scale actions combining economic instruments with national security objectives.
The result is that Europe has a profusion of economic security goals but lacks the means to achieve them. Although European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has warned of “the risk of weaponization of interdependencies,” and her commission has prepared a genuinely sophisticated strategy for European economic security, it doesn’t have the bureaucratic tools to deliver results. It has no equivalent of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is capable of gathering information and targeting measures against opponents, or of China’s new export control machinery.
One immediate test is whether Europe will use its purported big bazooka, the “anti-coercion instrument,” or let it rust into obsolescence. This complex legal mechanism—which allows the EU to respond to coercion through a broad set of tools, including limiting market access, foreign direct investment, and public procurement—is supposed to allow Brussels to retaliate against allies and adversaries. The instrument was conceived as a response to the threat of Trump’s first administration and hastily retrofitted to provide a means of pushing back against China.
From the beginning, however, European officials made it clear that they hoped they would never have to actually use the anti-coercion instrument, believing that its mere existence would be a sufficient deterrent. That has turned out to be a grave misjudgment. The anti-coercion instrument is encumbered with legalistic safeguards intended to ensure that the European Commission will not deploy it without sufficient approval from EU member states. Those safeguards make other powers such as China and the United States doubt that it will ever be used against them. Its lengthy deployment process will give them the opportunity they need to disarm any enforcement action, using threats and promises to mobilize internal opposition against it. As with earlier European efforts to block sanctions, China and the United States can usually bet on the EACO principle that “Europe Always Chickens Out” in geoeconomic confrontations. Europe lacks the information, institutional clout, and internal agreement to do much else.
The anti-coercion instrument is the exact opposite of the “Doomsday Machine” in the film Dr. Strangelove, the classic Cold War satire. That machine was a disaster because it automatically launched nuclear missiles in response to an attack but was kept a closely guarded secret until an attack was launched. In contrast, European officials talk incessantly about their doomsday device, but Europe’s adversaries feel sure that it will never be deployed; that certainty encourages them to coerce European companies and countries at their leisure.
SELF-SABOTAGE
Europe is hampered by structural weaknesses, but the United States’ difficulties largely result from its own choices. After decades of slowly building the complex machinery of economic warfare, the United States is ripping it apart.
This is in part an unintended consequence of domestic politics. The second Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze across the federal government, hitting many institutions including the Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, which oversees OFAC, and leaving key positions unfilled and departments understaffed. Initial budget proposals anticipate an overall reduction in funding for the office, even as the number of sanctions-related programs has continued to rise. Although U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has expressed support for his department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which is chiefly responsible for export controls, the agency lost over a dozen employees as part of the government’s sweeping force reductions. OFAC and the BIS were never as all-seeing as their reputations suggested and sometimes made mistakes. Nonetheless, they provided Washington with an extraordinary edge. Other countries had no equivalent to OFAC’s maps of global finance or the detailed understanding of semiconductor supply chains developed by key officials on Biden’s National Security Council.
Such institutional decay is the inevitable consequence of Trumpism. In Trump’s eyes, all institutional restraints on his power are illegitimate. This has led to a large overhaul of the apparatus that has served to direct economic security decisions over the last decades. As the journalist Nahal Toosi has documented in Politico, the National Security Council, which is supposed to coordinate security policy across the federal government and agencies, has cut its staff by more than half. The State Department has been decimated by job cuts, while the traditional interagency process through which policy gets made and communicated has virtually disappeared, leaving officials in the dark over what is expected of them and allowing adventurous officials to fill the vacuum with their own uncoordinated initiatives. Instead, policy is centered on Trump himself and whoever has last talked to him in the uncontrolled cavalcade of visitors streaming through the Oval Office. As personalism replaces bureaucratic decision-making, short-term profit trumps long-term national interest.
This is leading to pushback from allies—and from U.S. courts. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently warned that “the United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.” U.S. federal courts, which have long been exceedingly deferential to the executive when it comes to national security issues, may be having second thoughts. In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade issued a striking decision, holding that the United States had overstepped its authority when it invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—the legal bedrock for much of U.S. coercive power—to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico. That decision has been appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but the judgment is likely just the first of many challenges. Notably, the trade case resulted from a complaint filed by conservative and libertarian lawyers.
The Trump administration’s assault on state institutions is weakening the material sources of American power. Across core sectors—finance, technology, and energy—the administration is making the United States less central than it used to be. Trump and his allies are aggressively pushing cryptocurrencies, which are more opaque and less accountable than the traditional greenback, and forswearing enforcement actions against cryptocurrency platforms that enable sanctions evasion and money laundering. In April, the U.S. government lifted sanctions against Tornado Cash, a service that had laundered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stolen cryptocurrency for North Korea, according to the U.S. Department of Treasury. And the bipartisan American love affair with stablecoins, a kind of cryptocurrency, is pushing China and Europe to accelerate their efforts to develop alternative payment systems.
A interdependência econômica se voltou contra os Estados Unidos.
In some instances, the Trump administration has reversed Biden’s policies and promoted the diffusion of previously controlled technology. In a remarkable deal with the United Arab Emirates, the Trump administration agreed to facilitate the massive expansion of data centers in the region using advanced U.S. semiconductors despite continued relations between the UAE and China and warnings from policy experts that the United States should not depend on the Middle East for AI.
Most recently, the spending bill that Trump and his congressional allies pushed through earlier this summer effectively cedes control of next-generation energy technology to China by doubling down on the carbon economy. Even as Washington works to counteract Chinese influence over critical minerals, it is eliminating measures aimed at minimizing U.S. dependence on Chinese supply chains in the crucial areas of renewable energy and battery development and radically defunding its investment in science. The result is that the United States will face the unenviable choice between relying on Chinese energy technology or trying its best to make do with the moribund technologies of an earlier age.
One might have expected that the United States would respond to the age of weaponized interdependence as it responded to the earlier era of nuclear proliferation: by recalibrating its long-term strategy, building the institutional capabilities necessary to make good policy, and strengthening its global position. Instead, it is placing its bets on short-term dealmaking, gutting institutional capacity to analyze information and coordinate policy, and poisoning the economic and technological hubs that it still controls.
This does not just affect Washington’s ability to coerce others; it also undermines the attractiveness of key U.S. economic platforms. The use of weaponized interdependence always exploited the advantages of the “American stack”: the mutually reinforcing suite of institutional and technological relationships that drew others into the United States’ orbit. When used wisely, weaponization advanced slowly and within boundaries that others could tolerate.
Now, however, the United States is spiraling into a rapid and uncontrollable drawdown of its assets, pursuing short-term goals at the expense of long-term objectives. It is increasingly using its tools in a haphazard way that invites miscalculations and unanticipated consequences. And it is doing so in a world in which other countries are not only developing their own capacities to punish the United States but also building technological stacks that may be more appealing to the world than the United States’. If China leaps ahead on energy technology, as seems likely, other countries are going to be pulled into its orbit. Dark warnings from the United States about the risks of dependence on China will ring hollow to countries that are all too aware of how willing the United States is to weaponize interdependence for its own selfish purposes.
TIME TO REBUILD
In the first decades of the nuclear age, American policymakers faced enormous uncertainty about how to achieve stability and peace. That led them to make major investments in institutions and strategic doctrines that could prevent nightmare scenarios. Washington, now entering a similar moment in the age of weaponized interdependence, finds itself in a particularly precarious position.
The current U.S. administration recognizes that the United States is not only able to exploit others’ economic vulnerabilities but also deeply vulnerable itself. Addressing these problems, however, would require the administration to act counter to Trump’s deepest instincts.
The main problem is that as national security and economic policy merge, governments have to deal with excruciatingly complex phenomena that are not under their control: global supply chains, international financial flows, and emerging technological systems. Nuclear doctrines focused on predicting a single adversary’s responses; today, when geopolitics is shaped in large part by weaponized interdependence, governments must navigate a terrain with many more players, figuring out how to redirect private-sector supply chains in directions that do not hurt themselves while anticipating the responses of a multitude of governmental and nongovernmental actors.
Making the United States capable of holding its own in the age of weaponized interdependence will require more than just halting the rapid, unscheduled disassembly of the bureaucratic structures that constrain seat-of-the-pants policymaking and self-dealing. Successful strategy in an age of weaponized interdependence requires building up these very institutions to make them more flexible and more capable of developing the deep expertise that is needed to understand an enormously complex world in which Washington’s adversaries now hold many of the cards. That may be a difficult sell for a political system that has come to see expertise as a dirty word, but it is vitally necessary to preserve the national interest.
A China construiu um aparato burocrático para transformar gargalos em alavancagem prática.
China had already threatened to cut back its rare-earth supply to Japan during a 2010 territorial dispute, but it lacked the means to exploit this chokepoint systematically. After it woke up to the threat of the United States’ exploitation of chokepoints, China stole a page from the American playbook. In 2020, Beijing put in place an export control law that repurposed the basic elements of the U.S. system. This was followed in 2024 by new regulations restricting the export of dual-use items. In short order, China built a bureaucratic apparatus to turn chokepoints into practical leverage. China also realized that in a world of weaponized interdependence, power comes not from possessing substitutable commodities but from controlling the technological stack. Just as the United States restricted the export of chip manufacturing equipment and software, China forbade the export of equipment necessary to process rare earths. These complex regulatory systems provide China not only with greater control but also with crucial information about who is buying what, allowing it to target other countries’ pain points with greater finesse.
This is why American and European manufacturers found themselves in a bind this June. China did not use its new export control system simply to retaliate against Trump but to squeeze Europe and discourage it from siding with the United States. German car manufacturers such as Mercedes and BMW worried as much as their U.S. competitors that their production lines would grind to a halt without specialized magnets. When the United States and China first reached a provisional deal, Trump announced on Truth Social that “FULL MAGNETS, AND ANY NECESSARY RARE EARTHS, WILL BE SUPPLIED, UP FRONT, BY CHINA,” recognizing the urgency of the threat to the U.S. economy. China’s long-term problem is that its state is too powerful and too willing to intervene in the domestic economy for purely political purposes, hampering investment and potentially strangling innovation. Still, in the short term, it has built the critical capacity to reimpose controls as it deems necessary to resist further U.S. demands.
ALL TALK
Whether Europe can withstand pressure from Beijing—and, for that matter, from Washington—remains an open question. Europe has many of the capacities of a geoeconomic superpower but lacks the institutional machinery to make use of them. The SWIFT system, after all, is based in Belgium, as is Euroclear, the settlement infrastructure for many euro-based assets. European companies—including the Dutch semiconductor lithography giant ASML, the German enterprise software firm SAP, and the Swedish 5G provider Ericsson—occupy key chokepoints in technology stacks. The European single market is by some measures the second largest in the world, potentially allowing it to squeeze companies that want to sell goods to European businesses and consumers.
But that would require Europe to build its own comprehensive suite of institutions and independent stack of technologies. That is unlikely to happen in the short to medium term, unless the nascent “EuroStack” project, which aims to secure Europe from foreign interference by building an independent information technology base, really takes off. Even though Europe woke up to the danger of weaponized interdependence during the first Trump administration, it quickly fell back asleep.
In fairness, the EU’s weaknesses also reflect its unique circumstances: it depends on an outside military patron. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has heightened Europe’s short-term dependence on the United States, even as European countries struggle to bolster their defensive capacities. The Biden administration put a friendly gloss on economic coercion, coordinating with European governments such as the Netherlands to limit exports of ASML’s machinery to China. At the same time, the United States provided Europe with the detailed intelligence that it needed to wield financial sanctions and export controls against Russia, obviating the need for Europe to develop its own abilities.
Europe’s lassitude is heightened by internal divisions. When China imposed a series of export restrictions on Lithuania to punish it for its political support of Taiwan in 2021, German companies pressed the Lithuanian government to de-escalate. Again and again, Europe’s response to the threat of Chinese economic coercion has been kneecapped by European companies desperate to maintain their access to Chinese markets. At the same time, measures to increase economic security are repeatedly watered down by EU member states or qualified by trade missions to Beijing, which are full of senior officials eager to make deals.
Rubio meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, July 2025
Mandel Ngan / Reuters
Most profoundly, Europe finds it nearly impossible to act coherently on economic security because its countries jealously retain individual control over national security, whereas the EU as a whole manages trade and key aspects of market regulation. There are many highly competent officials scattered throughout the European Commission’s trade directorate and the national capitals of member states but few ways for them to coordinate on large-scale actions combining economic instruments with national security objectives.
The result is that Europe has a profusion of economic security goals but lacks the means to achieve them. Although European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has warned of “the risk of weaponization of interdependencies,” and her commission has prepared a genuinely sophisticated strategy for European economic security, it doesn’t have the bureaucratic tools to deliver results. It has no equivalent of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is capable of gathering information and targeting measures against opponents, or of China’s new export control machinery.
One immediate test is whether Europe will use its purported big bazooka, the “anti-coercion instrument,” or let it rust into obsolescence. This complex legal mechanism—which allows the EU to respond to coercion through a broad set of tools, including limiting market access, foreign direct investment, and public procurement—is supposed to allow Brussels to retaliate against allies and adversaries. The instrument was conceived as a response to the threat of Trump’s first administration and hastily retrofitted to provide a means of pushing back against China.
From the beginning, however, European officials made it clear that they hoped they would never have to actually use the anti-coercion instrument, believing that its mere existence would be a sufficient deterrent. That has turned out to be a grave misjudgment. The anti-coercion instrument is encumbered with legalistic safeguards intended to ensure that the European Commission will not deploy it without sufficient approval from EU member states. Those safeguards make other powers such as China and the United States doubt that it will ever be used against them. Its lengthy deployment process will give them the opportunity they need to disarm any enforcement action, using threats and promises to mobilize internal opposition against it. As with earlier European efforts to block sanctions, China and the United States can usually bet on the EACO principle that “Europe Always Chickens Out” in geoeconomic confrontations. Europe lacks the information, institutional clout, and internal agreement to do much else.
The anti-coercion instrument is the exact opposite of the “Doomsday Machine” in the film Dr. Strangelove, the classic Cold War satire. That machine was a disaster because it automatically launched nuclear missiles in response to an attack but was kept a closely guarded secret until an attack was launched. In contrast, European officials talk incessantly about their doomsday device, but Europe’s adversaries feel sure that it will never be deployed; that certainty encourages them to coerce European companies and countries at their leisure.
SELF-SABOTAGE
Europe is hampered by structural weaknesses, but the United States’ difficulties largely result from its own choices. After decades of slowly building the complex machinery of economic warfare, the United States is ripping it apart.
This is in part an unintended consequence of domestic politics. The second Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze across the federal government, hitting many institutions including the Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, which oversees OFAC, and leaving key positions unfilled and departments understaffed. Initial budget proposals anticipate an overall reduction in funding for the office, even as the number of sanctions-related programs has continued to rise. Although U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has expressed support for his department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which is chiefly responsible for export controls, the agency lost over a dozen employees as part of the government’s sweeping force reductions. OFAC and the BIS were never as all-seeing as their reputations suggested and sometimes made mistakes. Nonetheless, they provided Washington with an extraordinary edge. Other countries had no equivalent to OFAC’s maps of global finance or the detailed understanding of semiconductor supply chains developed by key officials on Biden’s National Security Council.
Such institutional decay is the inevitable consequence of Trumpism. In Trump’s eyes, all institutional restraints on his power are illegitimate. This has led to a large overhaul of the apparatus that has served to direct economic security decisions over the last decades. As the journalist Nahal Toosi has documented in Politico, the National Security Council, which is supposed to coordinate security policy across the federal government and agencies, has cut its staff by more than half. The State Department has been decimated by job cuts, while the traditional interagency process through which policy gets made and communicated has virtually disappeared, leaving officials in the dark over what is expected of them and allowing adventurous officials to fill the vacuum with their own uncoordinated initiatives. Instead, policy is centered on Trump himself and whoever has last talked to him in the uncontrolled cavalcade of visitors streaming through the Oval Office. As personalism replaces bureaucratic decision-making, short-term profit trumps long-term national interest.
This is leading to pushback from allies—and from U.S. courts. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently warned that “the United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.” U.S. federal courts, which have long been exceedingly deferential to the executive when it comes to national security issues, may be having second thoughts. In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade issued a striking decision, holding that the United States had overstepped its authority when it invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—the legal bedrock for much of U.S. coercive power—to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico. That decision has been appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but the judgment is likely just the first of many challenges. Notably, the trade case resulted from a complaint filed by conservative and libertarian lawyers.
The Trump administration’s assault on state institutions is weakening the material sources of American power. Across core sectors—finance, technology, and energy—the administration is making the United States less central than it used to be. Trump and his allies are aggressively pushing cryptocurrencies, which are more opaque and less accountable than the traditional greenback, and forswearing enforcement actions against cryptocurrency platforms that enable sanctions evasion and money laundering. In April, the U.S. government lifted sanctions against Tornado Cash, a service that had laundered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stolen cryptocurrency for North Korea, according to the U.S. Department of Treasury. And the bipartisan American love affair with stablecoins, a kind of cryptocurrency, is pushing China and Europe to accelerate their efforts to develop alternative payment systems.
A interdependência econômica se voltou contra os Estados Unidos.
In some instances, the Trump administration has reversed Biden’s policies and promoted the diffusion of previously controlled technology. In a remarkable deal with the United Arab Emirates, the Trump administration agreed to facilitate the massive expansion of data centers in the region using advanced U.S. semiconductors despite continued relations between the UAE and China and warnings from policy experts that the United States should not depend on the Middle East for AI.
Most recently, the spending bill that Trump and his congressional allies pushed through earlier this summer effectively cedes control of next-generation energy technology to China by doubling down on the carbon economy. Even as Washington works to counteract Chinese influence over critical minerals, it is eliminating measures aimed at minimizing U.S. dependence on Chinese supply chains in the crucial areas of renewable energy and battery development and radically defunding its investment in science. The result is that the United States will face the unenviable choice between relying on Chinese energy technology or trying its best to make do with the moribund technologies of an earlier age.
One might have expected that the United States would respond to the age of weaponized interdependence as it responded to the earlier era of nuclear proliferation: by recalibrating its long-term strategy, building the institutional capabilities necessary to make good policy, and strengthening its global position. Instead, it is placing its bets on short-term dealmaking, gutting institutional capacity to analyze information and coordinate policy, and poisoning the economic and technological hubs that it still controls.
This does not just affect Washington’s ability to coerce others; it also undermines the attractiveness of key U.S. economic platforms. The use of weaponized interdependence always exploited the advantages of the “American stack”: the mutually reinforcing suite of institutional and technological relationships that drew others into the United States’ orbit. When used wisely, weaponization advanced slowly and within boundaries that others could tolerate.
Now, however, the United States is spiraling into a rapid and uncontrollable drawdown of its assets, pursuing short-term goals at the expense of long-term objectives. It is increasingly using its tools in a haphazard way that invites miscalculations and unanticipated consequences. And it is doing so in a world in which other countries are not only developing their own capacities to punish the United States but also building technological stacks that may be more appealing to the world than the United States’. If China leaps ahead on energy technology, as seems likely, other countries are going to be pulled into its orbit. Dark warnings from the United States about the risks of dependence on China will ring hollow to countries that are all too aware of how willing the United States is to weaponize interdependence for its own selfish purposes.
TIME TO REBUILD
In the first decades of the nuclear age, American policymakers faced enormous uncertainty about how to achieve stability and peace. That led them to make major investments in institutions and strategic doctrines that could prevent nightmare scenarios. Washington, now entering a similar moment in the age of weaponized interdependence, finds itself in a particularly precarious position.
The current U.S. administration recognizes that the United States is not only able to exploit others’ economic vulnerabilities but also deeply vulnerable itself. Addressing these problems, however, would require the administration to act counter to Trump’s deepest instincts.
The main problem is that as national security and economic policy merge, governments have to deal with excruciatingly complex phenomena that are not under their control: global supply chains, international financial flows, and emerging technological systems. Nuclear doctrines focused on predicting a single adversary’s responses; today, when geopolitics is shaped in large part by weaponized interdependence, governments must navigate a terrain with many more players, figuring out how to redirect private-sector supply chains in directions that do not hurt themselves while anticipating the responses of a multitude of governmental and nongovernmental actors.
Making the United States capable of holding its own in the age of weaponized interdependence will require more than just halting the rapid, unscheduled disassembly of the bureaucratic structures that constrain seat-of-the-pants policymaking and self-dealing. Successful strategy in an age of weaponized interdependence requires building up these very institutions to make them more flexible and more capable of developing the deep expertise that is needed to understand an enormously complex world in which Washington’s adversaries now hold many of the cards. That may be a difficult sell for a political system that has come to see expertise as a dirty word, but it is vitally necessary to preserve the national interest.
A China construiu um aparato burocrático para transformar gargalos em alavancagem prática.
Washington tem se concentrado mais em pensar na melhor forma de usar essas armas do que em quando elas não devem ser usadas. Outros países têm se mostrado dispostos a confiar na infraestrutura tecnológica e financeira dos EUA, apesar dos riscos, porque viam os Estados Unidos como um governo cujo interesse próprio era limitado, pelo menos em certa medida, pelo Estado de Direito e pela disposição de considerar os interesses de seus aliados. Esse cálculo mudou, provavelmente de forma irreversível, à medida que o segundo governo Trump deixou claro que vê os países com os quais os Estados Unidos historicamente estiveram mais próximos menos como aliados do que como Estados vassalos. Sem limites claros e aplicáveis à coerção dos EUA, as empresas multinacionais mais dominantes sediadas nos EUA, como Google e J.P. Morgan, se verão presas na terra de ninguém de uma nova zona de guerra, recebendo fogo de todos os lados. À medida que os países trabalham para se isolar da coerção dos EUA (e da infraestrutura americana), os mercados globais estão passando por profunda fragmentação e fratura. Há "uma crescente aceitação da fragmentação" na economia global, alertou o ex-secretário do Tesouro Larry Summers, e "talvez ainda mais preocupante — acho que há uma sensação crescente de que o nosso pode não ser o melhor fragmento para se associar".
Isso, por sua vez, sugere uma lição mais profunda. Os Estados Unidos se beneficiaram de sua capacidade de transformar a interdependência em uma arma ao longo do último quarto de século. Desfrutaram das vantagens de uma economia internacional baseada em instituições multilaterais e um regime tecnológico construído em torno de sua autoimagem de potência liberal, mesmo agindo de forma unilateral e, às vezes, antiliberal para proteger seus interesses como bem entendessem. Há apenas um ano, alguns intelectuais e formuladores de políticas americanos esperavam que esse sistema pudesse sobreviver por tempo indeterminado, para que a força coercitiva unilateral dos EUA e os valores liberais continuassem a andar de mãos dadas.
Isso agora parece extremamente improvável. Os Estados Unidos enfrentam uma escolha: um mundo em que a coerção agressiva americana e o declínio hegemônico dos EUA se reforçam mutuamente, ou um mundo em que Washington se realinha com outros países de mentalidade liberal, renunciando ao abuso de seus poderes unilaterais. Não faz muito tempo, autoridades americanas e muitos intelectuais percebiam a era da interdependência armamentista e a era da hegemonia americana como uma só. Tais premissas agora parecem ultrapassadas, à medida que outros países também obtêm essas armas. Assim como na era nuclear, os Estados Unidos precisam abandonar o unilateralismo e adotar a détente e o controle de armas, e, talvez a longo prazo, reconstruir uma economia global interdependente sobre bases mais sólidas. Não fazê-lo colocará em risco tanto a segurança quanto a prosperidade americanas.
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