The Chokepoint Trap: How the Search for Economic Security Will End in Geopolitical Calamity
Foreign Affairs · Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, and Yeling Tan ·
Niall Ferguson, the leading historian of empire, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and AI scholar Lisa Klassen offer a novel reframing of the US-China AI race in the history of world empires. The authors argue that AI is inherently imperial in it ambitions and structure, and that, like previous technological empires, China and US have amassed extraordinary global but that it's happening at a much faster pace. Rise and fall cycle will be faster. It will either lead to catastrophe or slow decline.
Policymakers used to ignore chokepoints. Now they have trouble seeing anything else. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration warns allies against dependence on China while it hunts for ways to exploit those allies’ own dependence on the United States—on its market, technologies, financial system, and security umbrella. Beijing, meanwhile, accuses Washington of economic coercion while leveraging its dominance over critical supply chains to press the United States and Europe. Europe hopes to build the euro into an alternative global currency to evade the dollar’s iron grip. Smaller players, too, have gotten into the act, as Iran tries to leverage its control over the Strait of Hormuz to put a stranglehold on the global oil trade.
This obsession with wielding and countering chokepoint power may seem sudden, but it has evolved over the last quarter century as a byproduct of globalization itself. As economies integrated, chokepoints proliferated: manufacturers extended supply chains across borders, banks routed transactions through the U.S. dollar system to minimize costs and delays, digital services took advantage of economies of scale, leading the market to become dominated by a handful of platforms. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the United States combined its advocacy for free markets with an increasingly ambitious effort to exploit its dominant position in these networks, surveilling global communications and using its influence over banks worldwide to cut off financial flows to its adversaries. But even as it did so, most politicians and business leaders continued to focus on globalization’s economic efficiencies.
Moves by Trump in his first term, however, caused world leaders to take more notice of chokepoints. The COVID-19 pandemic heightened countries’ fears of external dependence. Then, during Trump’s second administration, China learned that the best way to stop him is to squeeze a chokepoint. The United States’ hubristic erosion of basic norms of constraint led other countries, such as Iran, to explore options they had never previously dared to exploit.
Read the full story at Foreign Affairs · All coverage of this story