According to a Sanskrit saying, “yasyāsti vittaṃ sa naraḥ kulīnaḥ sa paṇḍitaḥ sa śrutimān guṇajñaḥ” (one who has got money is considered high-born). He is also thought of as a learned man, well-read, a connoisseur of virtues, a pandit, an orator, a handsome person, as all the qualities are ascribed to wealth.
America is a wealthy nation. But the American economy is used as a weapon by successive presidents in one form or other.
This viewpoint is illustrated well by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in their book, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.” As Farrell explains in his talk, “these global networks turn out to be surprisingly centralized. There are choke points, there are central nodes, they’re like the hub and spoke system of an airline.” Spying and sanctions are discussed in this book at length. In fact, that is the subject matter of the scholarly work. The US used the world economy as a weapon to dominate the world.
There are six chapters in this work of research and erudition. The Citibank Chairman and CEO Walter Wriston’s world is presented to the reader in the first part of the book entitled: “Walter Wriston’s World.” In this chapter, the authors have revealed how ‘underground’ bases like money, submarine cables, data centers, and semiconductors were used by America to overlord the world.
Test Your Knowledge: Undersea Chokepoints
1. What percentage of global data travels through undersea cables?
2. Which NSA program tapped fiber-optic cables as revealed by Snowden?
3. Which sector’s export controls are highlighted as chokepoints in the book?
The second chapter named “The STORMBREW Map” explains the explosive revelations made by Edward Snowden. As Newman explains, “if most of the international data is routing through our territory, then we will tap into that.” The NSA developed “a splitter because… it’s traveling as light. And so it’s like a prism. It takes the light and it splits the light. And so it gets a perfect copy of what is happening in the data and it then records it.” The economic sanctions against Islamic nations and war are also shown as a cause and effect.
The financial events described by Farrell and Newman are mind-blowing. “The War Without Gunsmoke” section deals with many notable companies and their scams including an attempt of intellectual property stealing and related court case by Chinese company Huawei. As Newman explains, “many of the products that we rely on today, they’re not really fully made by one company, but they rely on a very complicated supply chain of networks, of different companies providing different inputs.”
“Hook’s Captain” chapter throws light on dangerous agenda of the US to dominate the planet through multinational companies. No wonder America is a paradise for free enterprise.
In the name of security, how the US keeps the smaller nations under its grip is explained in the sections called “Waking into Winter” and “The Empire of Wind and Light.” Newman warns that “this use of these tools is increasingly being used by the US government. And our concern is that they could get out of control because it’s not just that we use them but then other actors respond.”
This book is a must-read in the background of Trump’s daily threats about tariffs. The style is racy and it is based on research. The book is published by Henry Holt and Co. in the U.S. and by Penguin Books in the UK.In short, American domination of the world is achieved by the superpower by use of spying and sanctions. As Farrell argues, “webs turn out very often to have spiders lurking at their heart, at the heart of this web of apparently peaceful and harmonious commercial exchange. There lurks the spider of geopolitics.” This fact is well brought out in a scholarly treatise named: “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy” by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. One can understand the belligerent attitude of Donald Trump by reading this well-written and researched volume.
