Weaponized Interdependence

In Chip War, Chris Miller names “weaponized interdependence” — the framework of academics Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman — as the logic underlying U.S. semiconductor export controls. The thesis: countries are more intertwined than ever, but rather than defusing conflict, interdependence creates new venues for competition, turning the networks that knit nations together into a domain of conflict. Miller’s example is the U.S. weaponizing other countries’ reliance on the dollar banking system to punish Iran. Farrell and Newman worried this use of trade and capital flows as political weapons threatened globalization and risked dangerous unintended consequences; the Trump administration, by contrast, concluded it had unique power to weaponize semiconductor supply chains.

The book frames the strike on Huawei as the demonstration case: Beijing evidently calculated it was better to accept Huawei becoming a second-rate technology player than to retaliate, because the U.S. holds “escalation dominance” when it comes to severing supply chains. As one former senior official mused after the strike: “Weaponized interdependence. It’s a beautiful thing.” Chip War’s Foreign Policy thread (Harold Brown’s “High Tech Is Foreign Policy”) connects the concept to export controls as statecraft.

Context: “Weaponized interdependence” is a term coined by political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (in a 2019 International Security article) to describe how states with privileged positions in global networks — financial, informational, or supply-chain — can exploit those chokepoints for coercion and surveillance. It has become a standard frame in international-relations and economic-security scholarship.

Where this appears

• Chip War — names Farrell and Newman’s framework and develops it as the logic of U.S. export controls and the Huawei strike, with “escalation dominance” over supply chains as the operative U.S. advantage.