The Risks to American Network Power
It me, warning about declines to come.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has been running a Future of American Power project this year, asking a variety of analysts about different dimensions of powers, and what the United States can actually do with the power it has. Discerning readers should check out some of the papers, including Peter Harrell on the future of American economic power and David E. Lewis on U.S. state capacity and American power.
Oh and hey, no big deal, but I have a paper in the series as well that was published yesterday entitled, “Network and Structural Power: The Four Trend Lines Weakening U.S. Leverage.” Network power consists of structures ranging from global supply chains to energy pipelines to technological stacks that are hard to displace and endow actors in control of critical nodes with disproportionate power.
Carnegie asked me to assess the current state of American network power, and where it is trending. Here’s an excerpt:
There is a sweet spot in the exercise of network power. For it to persist, other actors need to believe that the benefits of belonging to such a network outweigh the costs and risks of being vulnerable to hegemonic pressure. Actors that possess network power therefore need to make those structures enticing to others. If those networks are used to coerce, hegemons who control the networks also need to reassure other countries that any weaponization of such networks will be limited to exceptional circumstances.
As this paper demonstrates, the United States has spent the past few decades weaponizing its network power to advance its interests in world politics. This has enabled successive administrations to pressure allies and adversaries alike into policy concessions—and, more importantly, deter adverse policy shifts before they occur….
As the U.S. government has shifted from an inclusive to an extractive approach toward its structural power, however, the future is less promising. This is for four interrelated reasons:
The United States is overestimating the recursive aspects of its network power.
The growing weaponization of network power against allies is degrading that very same power.
By seeking to use network power coercively for a broader range of objectives, the United States has met growing resistance, undermining perceptions of its power.
Rival states are developing alternative networks that will eventually compete with U.S. networks—even if measuring the attractiveness of these alternatives is an inherently uncertain enterprise.
You will have to read the whole thing to see why I am making these arguments. It is worth noting, however, that in the past week alone there have been a number of stories about U.S. allies deciding it is worth making costly investments to diversify away from American networks. For example, the Financial Times’ Ilya Gridneff has a story with the opening sentence, “Canada has taken a crucial step towards building an oil pipeline to supply Asia with up to 1mn barrels of crude daily as Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to make the nation an ‘energy superpower’ and break its dependence on the US market.”
The evidence of resistance from European allies is also mounting — aided and abetted by Carney. A few days ago the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, and Daniel Michaels provided some astonishing behind-the-scenes details about European leaders deciding they have no choice but to hedging against some U.S. networks:1
For a year, America’s closest allies had tried to placate Trump with a mix of flattery and concessions on mutual-defense and trade issues, hoping to buy time. Now, French soldiers were in Greenland, alongside Danish special forces equipped for a shooting war with America. The French president repeated an argument he’d been pressing for years, with mounting urgency: that Europe’s overreliance on America was a security risk. “There is no going back,” he said.
A clutch of European leaders chimed in to complain that the administration seemed more interested in mining and energy deals than upholding America’s traditional role in the world. Europe risked becoming “a miserable slave” to the U.S., groused the prime minister of Belgium….
Several participants mentioned a man who wasn’t in the room. Mark Carney, the new Canadian prime minister, had been regularly messaging Europe’s major leaders using a British phone number from his time in London, trying to persuade them that “the old America isn’t coming back.” Now, on the heels of a blistering speech at the annual Davos gathering, his arguments were gaining ground….
American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.
Europeans are running studies on where they would store their data or process their payments should friction with the U.S. escalate, and how well their American-made weaponry would operate without Washington’s authorization. Nations whose empires once spanned the globe are now stuck trying to extricate themselves from their humbling dependency on American technology and military power, without provoking the U.S.
More recent U.S. actions are only stiffening the Europeans’ resolve.
Now is normally the time when I would say that the current administration is bollixing things up yet again. But I want to stress here that “running studies” is not the same thing as actual diversification. Even if it leads to action, a lot of what is described above will take years to kick in. The Trump administration was pretty aggressive in using an extractive approach during its first term — and a lot of U.S.-led networks have nonetheless persisted.
That is the thing about network power. It looks and is formidable — right up to the moment that a tipping point causes a dynamic shift. In other words, it is often difficult to measure any appreciable decline in network power until it crashes.
That said, I am not optimistic about where American network power will be a decade from now. And you can read the paper to find out why.
The WSJ story also provides the perfect Toddler in Chief anecdote: “Weeks into Trump’s second term, Macron visited to discuss NATO and Ukraine. The two spent hours together, and the U.S. president seemed open to his ideas. They used a tablet to dial into a video call led by Justin Trudeau. But as the Canadian prime minister was talking, Trump, frustrated with a technical issue that prevented him from chiming in, lobbed the device over the Resolute Desk and onto the floor, an official present said.”
How do you lose network power? Gradually, then suddenly.
That's a remarkably clean looking switch in the picture.