Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman
When Washington announced a “framework deal” with China in June, it marked a silent shifting of gears in the global political economy. This was not the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s imagined epoch of “liberation” under unilateral American greatness or a return to the Biden administration’s dream of managed great-power rivalry. Instead, it was the true opening of the age of weaponized interdependence, in which the United States is discovering what it is like to have others do unto it as it has eagerly done unto others.
This new era will be shaped by weapons of economic and technological coercion—sanctions, supply chain attacks, and export measures—that repurpose the many points of control in the infrastructure that underpins the interdependent global economy. For over two decades, the United States has unilaterally weaponized these chokepoints in finance, information flows, and technology for strategic advantage. But market exchange has become hopelessly entangled with national security, and the United States must now defend its interests in a world in which other powers can leverage chokepoints of their own.
That is why the Trump administration had to make a deal with China. Administration officials now acknowledge that they made concessions on semiconductor export controls in return for China’s easing restrictions on rare-earth minerals that were crippling the United States’ auto industry. U.S. companies that provide chip design software, such as Synopsys and Cadence, can once again sell their technology in China. This concession will help the Chinese semiconductor industry wriggle out of the bind it found itself in when the Biden administration started limiting China’s ability to build advanced semiconductors. And the U.S. firm Nvidia can again sell H20 chips for training artificial intelligence to Chinese customers.
In a little-noticed speech in June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hinted at the administration’s reasoning. China had “cornered the market” for rare earths, putting the United States and the world in a “crunch,” he said. The administration had come to realize “that our industrial capability is deeply dependent on a number of potential adversary nation-states, including China, who can hold it over our head,” shifting the “nature of geopolitics,” in “one of the great challenges of the new century.”
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