Delirium tilted over into imperial folly, as high officials began to think that they could use America’s economic power to re-order the world better to their liking.

THREE DECADES ago, a German history professor listed 210 proposed explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire. The remarkable array included such fanciful causes as Bolshevism, public baths, hedonism, the pressure of terrorism and, most famously, lead poisoning.

The last explanation has been discredited. It is highly unlikely that lead water pipes caused the empire to collapse in a tumult of brain damage, gout and madness. Yet exploded theories can point towards important truths. Like classical Rome, America’s empire today depends less on pomp than on plumbing. Instead of roads, aqueducts and seaports, it relies on pipelines conveying financial flows and torrents of data, as well as vast distributed supply chains. These look like a global public infrastructure, but can readily be redirected to private national strategic advantage. America’s domination of obscure, seeming technical structures is generating its own forms of hubristic folly among imperial administrators, who have begun to think that there is nothing they cannot do with it.

Far beneath the boastful speeches, petty insults and spiteful feuds; the fights over NATO and Russian influence operations; the subterranean conduits of empire are failing. If America’s empire is indeed headed towards expiry, many future historians will blame the obvious problems: the rise of China, overextension in the Middle East, the defection of allies. Yet some might trace the beginnings of decay back to two more quotidian crises: America’s botched decision to sanction the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE Corporation, and Europe’s creation of an apparently innocuous technical arrangement—the “Special Purpose Vehicle”—purportedly to facilitate humanitarian exchange with Iran.

TO CHART the empires of antiquity you simply mapped the cities, rivers and roads through which power flowed. Today’s international economy has a far more complex topography that encompasses both the physical and the digital. Crucial resources—money, information and components—pass through an intricate global tangle of conduits. These started to coalesce into their current configuration a quarter of a century ago, at a moment when the world economy appeared to be secure from empire’s grasp.

The early 1990s seemed the beginning of a new and simpler world where the law of kings had been displaced by the lex mercatoria. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states created a temporary delirium of liberalism, in which it appeared that bitter international disputes over the ordering of the economy were giving way to the complete victory of the free market. The historian Quinn Slobodian describes how neoliberals had long desired the victory of “dominium”—a global order based on property rights, free global and national exchange—over “imperium”—the power of national states to control property, block financial flows, and harness markets for strategic ends. In the 1990s, it appeared that imperium was being beaten back inside the bounds of national borders. States found themselves increasingly unable to interfere with business investments for fear of capital flight. As national power retreated, a new global order of easy trade and financial and intellectual exchange took its place, underpinned by multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization.

In this new era, businesses not only sought to grow and bestride the world, but to remake it in their own image. The great banks and financial corporations aggressively built international capital markets. E-commerce and social media companies constructed global platforms that seemed intended to rebuild national markets and societies on the basis of a deracinated universal liberalism. Sophisticated manufacturing firms like Apple invented new ways of doing business, where the parent company mostly provided intellectual capital, putting out physical production to other firms. All that was solid melted into sophisticated design concepts and supply management software.

This new world, like its self-appointed prophet Thomas Friedman, described itself through a garble of metaphors for flatness, openness and all-conquering market forces. U.S. policymakers believed that illiberal states could be tamed by free information and economic openness, welcoming China into the World Trade Organization. The Internet was by definition untamable: Bill Clinton famously described China’s efforts to control it as like nailing Jell-O to the wall. When the Arab Spring blossomed, it seemed a decisive demonstration of the power of social media to topple illiberal states and replace them with a less oppressive order.

These vast new flows of money, information and manufacturing components required the construction of a correspondingly vast infrastructure. Global finance relied on a complex system of institutions to clear transactions and facilitate messaging and communications between different financial institutions. The Internet was built on routing systems, physical “pipelines” and redundant information storage facilities to move and house data. Complex supply chains needed equally complex networks that drew together a myriad of assemblers, suppliers and sub-suppliers.

These infrastructural systems at first appeared to be technical, dull and apolitical. The businesses and private organizations that built them weren’t particularly concerned with geopolitics. They were rationalizers, who worked carefully and systematically to reduce the myriad complex interactions of the new world into an economically efficient order. This new order made visible what had previously been obscure, and centralized and made tangible what had previously been diffuse and difficult to grasp. By mapping and organizing the world for business, however, it accidentally made it more vulnerable to state power.

Financial institutions wanted to communicate with other financial institutions so that they could send and receive money. This led them to abandon inefficient institution-to-institution communications and to converge on a common solution: the financial messaging system maintained by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) consortium, based in Belgium. Similarly, banks wanted to make transactions in the globally dominant currency, the U.S. dollar. This led them to rely on the U.S. dollar clearing system, which is dominated by a small number of American institutions. Internet communications are in theory supposed to be decentralized by design. In practice, the physical infrastructure, for a variety of efficiency reasons, tended to channel global flows through a small number of central data cables and switch points. Global supply chains, pursuing Adam Smith’s economic logic of specialization, often relied on a tiny number of key suppliers for crucial and difficult to manufacture components, so that a fire in a single factory could bring entire industries to a near standstill.

This did not just transform economies; it transformed international security. A global economy meant that states’ economies were interdependent with each other. This made certain kinds of large-scale coercion less likely—the Chinese and U.S. economies became so intimately entwined that one could not hurt the other without hurting itself. Direct military conflict over Taiwan became more costly as supply chains crisscrossed the strait. However, troubling new vulnerabilities to monitoring, disruption and abuse opened up, as states relied ever more on shared financial, informational and production networks.

Crucially, underneath the emollient rhetoric, this new world was anything but flat. The centralizing tendencies meant that the new infrastructure of global networks was asymmetric: some nodes and connections were far more important than others. These asymmetries mapped onto existing asymmetries in the global economy: the channels and key control points were overwhelmingly located in advanced industrialized states. What this meant was that a few states—most prominently the United States—had the latent ability to transform the global economic infrastructures that had been built to facilitate international exchange into an architecture of global power and information gathering. By seizing control of the key chokepoints in the infrastructure, they could turn this vast infrastructure into a machinery of domination. In the 1990s, business and private actors had beaten back the state to build a vast dominium of their own, which seemed to exclude governments from direct influence. Yet they built it unconsciously so as to allow imperium to come in through the back door.

AFTER THE attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States increasingly turned the global network into a weapon against threats and adversaries. This strategic transformation came about half by accident, in haphazard steps and quarter-steps. Yet its consequences were enormous. Over the last eighteen years, America has quietly created an occulted imperium, quite distinct from the sprawling system of military and naval facilities through which America exerts physical force, based not on high politics, but on control of apparently apolitical plumbing facilities.

This began with the SWIFT financial messaging network. The United States saw SWIFT as a “Rosetta Stone,” which it could use to decipher complex financial relationships amongst terrorists and state adversaries. As Juan Zarate, a former Treasury official saw it at the time in Treasury’s War, “Access to SWIFT data would give the U.S. government a method of uncovering never-before-seen financial links, information that could unlock important clues to the next plot or allow an entire support network to be exposed and disrupted.” The U.S. government quietly obliged SWIFT to provide it with extensive access to financial transaction data, breaking European law (due to SWIFT being based in Belgium) for fear of harsher U.S. penalties. When Europeans discovered this (thanks to a New York Times front page exposé), the United States was able to persuade the European Union (EU) to agree that the United States would continue to have access to the data, so long as it shared security information with European authorities too.

SWIFT is not just useful for gathering information. It is an essential part of the international payments system. If banks—or even entire countries—are denied access to SWIFT, they could largely be cut out of the global financial system. This provided a far more effective means of punishment and coercion than traditional sanctions. It didn’t just ban states from national markets, but isolated them from the global economy.

Without SWIFT, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran would likely have never happened. The United States and EU are world economic powers, but their most potent actions were taken indirectly through SWIFT. In 2012, the United States and the EU took parallel decisions to ban the provision of financial messaging services to Iran. This severely damaged the Iranian banking sector and the broader Iranian economy. Removing the SWIFT sanctions became a key strategic goal for Iran, prompting them to offer wide-reaching concessions on their nuclear program in return.

The United States was further able to isolate Iran, North Korea and other adversaries because of its influence over the dollar clearing system. Foreign banks needed to be able to process dollar transactions in order to carry out their ordinary business. This meant, however, that they were vulnerable to U.S. pressure, exercised through an extensive system of “secondary sanctions,” which the United States started to deploy in earnest in 2006. As Zarate described it, the United States discovered that “banks are the ligaments of the international system.” This led Washington to take steps, in the words of former Treasury official Rachel Loeffler in Foreign Affairs, so that “U.S. national security policy and the international banking system have become inextricably intertwined.” The United States could threaten to cut off foreign financial institutions’ access to the dollar clearing system if they did not implement U.S. foreign policy objectives abroad.

The United States deliberately worked to enhance its power through creating a more general horror of contagion. It could designate financial institutions as money launderers, so that other banks that were exposed to the dollar clearing system would flee from doing business with them. This, combined with the vagueness and unpredictability of the U.S. sanctions enforcement regime, terrified the compliance departments of foreign banks. As a result, many foreign banks refuse to process transactions that might even indirectly involve states or entities that the U.S. had designated as threats. Sometimes the reign of fear had perverse consequences; major banks balked at doing business with Iran even after the United States had lifted secondary sanctions, and the U.S. secretary of state traveled to Europe to reassure CEOs that they could safely engage again.

The Internet provided the United States with a privileged vantage point on the world’s communications. Many of the most important pipelines for Internet data traversed the United States, while e-commerce companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon Web Services stored data on U.S. soil. Access to this data was sometimes legally complicated—but it was also possible for intelligence agencies to tap into it overseas, with some restrictions. The result was a bonanza of valuable intelligence data. As National Security Agency (NSA) Director Michael Hayden described it,

This is a home game for us. Are we not going to take advantage that so much of it goes through Redmond, Washington? […] Why would we not turn the most powerful telecommunications and computing management structure on the planet to our use?

Finally, the United States was able to use its dominance over information technology supply chains to deprive adversaries such as Iran of access to advanced components, under an export control regime that prevented many forms of trade with designated countries. No one—including foreign companies—wanted to be designated as a supplier of forbidden technologies. This would not only deny them access to the U.S. market, but might also mean that any other company that wanted access to the U.S. market would be forbidden from doing business with them. The result was that Iran’s missile program had to rely on second rate components, sourced through shadowy networks and middlemen, who could themselves be subverted through “left of launch” programs to sell sabotaged equipment.

At its height, some U.S. officials seemed almost delirious at the extent of their invisible empire. Their control over the central channels of finance, information and technology seemed to provide them with an unparalleled stranglehold over the global economy. They were egged on by Washington organizations such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a vehemently anti-Iran pressure group, that saw these financial tools as a way to promote regime change.

Yet towards the end of the Obama administration, doubts began to creep in. The Snowden revelations led to a global backlash against U.S. Internet surveillance. Intelligence agencies were obliged to accept some limits on their activities against allies. It became increasingly clear that America’s technological advantage was under threat from China, which was developing its own domestic capacities, building research alliances with sophisticated foreign firms and, where all else failed, stealing technologies from U.S. firms.

A few key officials worried about American overreach. In a 2016 speech, President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew spoke of the great security benefits of America’s financial hegemony. However, he warned that this hegemony could not be taken for granted. If the United States abused its financial dominance, “financial transactions may begin to move outside of the United States entirely—which could threaten the central role of the U.S. financial system globally, not to mention the effectiveness of our sanctions in the future.” Lew’s speech attracted some attention, but a new administration was elected only six months later.

THE TRUMP administration believed fervently in the unilateral power of the United States to impose its demands on the rest of the world, and was highly skeptical of arguments about limits and backlash. The Obama administration’s ginger embrace of Iran was reconfigured into a stranglehold, while sanctions against Chinese firms became a bargaining counter in a wider fight over trade and technology. Delirium tilted over into imperial folly, as high officials began to think that they could use America’s economic power to reorder the world better to their liking. As they have sought to turn the apparatus of infrastructure into a true tool of empire, reducing allies into near-vassals, control risks slipping from their grasp. Both friends and adversaries are reconsidering the advantages and disadvantages of attachment to an infrastructure that has become a means of force projection.

From the beginning, the Trump administration made it clear that it was opposed to the JCPOA deal under which Iran had foresworn its nuclear ambitions in exchange for a return to the SWIFT system and relief from secondary sanctions. In May 2018, the administration announced that it was withdrawing from the deal and in August it reintroduced secondary sanctions. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin reportedly fought Iran hawks in the administration to try to prevent the reimposition of sanctions on SWIFT. He lost, and in public comments on November 2 made it clear that the United States intended to “aggressively” exert financial pressure on Iran, so that it would subject SWIFT to sanctions if it provided messaging services to designated Iranian banks.

Unlike Obama, Donald Trump did not use careful diplomacy to build international support for these measures against Iran. Instead, he imposed them by fiat, to the consternation of European allies, who remained committed to the JCPOA. The United States now threatened to impose draconian penalties on its allies’ firms if they continued to work inside the terms of an international agreement that the United States itself had negotiated. The EU invoked a blocking statute, which effectively made it illegal for European firms to comply with U.S. sanctions, but without any significant consequences. SWIFT, for example, avoided the statute by never formally stating that it was complying with U.S. sanctions; instead explaining that it was regrettably suspending relations with Iranian banks “in the interest of the stability and integrity of the wider global financial system.”

European allies responded to these unilateral steps by announcing a new Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), called INSTEX, at the end of January. The SPV supports trade between Europe and Iran outside the conventional financial system through a complex arrangement of matching transactions. Although the system is initially supposed to facilitate humanitarian trade, it could readily be used for other transactions between Iran and Europe.

The Trump administration also escalated its use of sanctions and export control rules against non-European firms. The Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE had violated the U.S. sanctions and export control regime by exporting goods with U.S. components to North Korea and Iran. This led to a negotiated settlement where ZTE agreed to a $1.2 billion fine and to punish employees who had been involved in the violations. The Department of Commerce soon discovered that ZTE had lied and declined to punish many of the employees. In retaliation, the United States announced on April 16, 2018 that American suppliers were banned from providing components to ZTE for a period of seven years. ZTE relied on U.S. producers such as Qualcomm to provide highly specialized chips that were unavailable elsewhere, meaning that the U.S. measures would effectively drive ZTE out of business.

The political reaction in China was sharp and immediate. On April 20 and 21 of the same year, the Chinese government held a conference on cybersecurity that all seven members of the standing committee of the Politburo attended. The likely result is a sharp acceleration in efforts to build up China’s own semiconductor manufacturing capacity, to ensure that it was not vulnerable to such threats in the future. Although Trump himself soon acted to heavily water down the penalty (imposing another large fine in lieu of the initially announced ban), the consequence has been to push China to limit its reliance on strategic foreign components that can easily be interdicted.

Europe’s and China’s reactions both show how America’s secret empire—its power over the global infrastructures that support flows of finance, information and components—could only be maintained so long as it was not overused. Unilateral actions that threaten the interests of other powerful states will lead them to react. Some will respond, as China did, through self-help; building their own surplus capacities to strengthen themselves against foreign manipulation. Russia is building up reserves in gold and yuan as barricades against further international financial coercion. Others, like the EU, may not be hunkering down but building out.

The SPV will almost certainly not create strong economic bonds between Iran and Europe. At best, it will keep relations with Iran in a holding pattern. Europe’s trade with Iran is limited, and will likely remain so.

The real risk for the United States is both more subtle and profound. The SPV is a put option on American hegemony. It will allow Europe to begin experimenting with alternative arrangements to U.S.-based infrastructures that could be the seed of a greater transformation. In a recent report, “Towards a Stronger International Role of the Euro,” the European Commission described U.S. unilateralism as a “wake-up call regarding Europe’s economic and monetary sovereignty.”

This helps explain Vice President Mike Pence’s extraordinary harangue against the SPV in Warsaw in February. Pence demanded that America’s European allies withdraw from the JCPOA, claiming that the SPV was “an ill-advised step that will only strengthen Iran, weaken the EU and create still more distance between Europe and the United States.” Treasury Undersecretary Sigal Mandelker further warned Europe that “those that engage in activities that run afoul of U.S. sanctions risk severe consequences, including losing access to the U.S. financial system and the ability to do business with the United States.”

As former State Department official Jarrett Blanc warns, “The Iran SPV, though, will teach its managers lessons that can be applied to other cases in the future,” such as Russia, if the U.S.-Russia relationship continues to worsen. Blanc describes a “nightmare scenario of the U.S. pushing its financial power so far that our allies and partners feel compelled to build financial alternatives to New York and the dollar,” with profound consequences for “the tremendous influence the U.S. enjoys as the global backbone for even simple banking operations.” Former Treasury Secretary Lew expressed doubt in February at the Atlantic Council that the SPV could work as hoped for Iran, but warned that

the plumbing is being built and tested to work around the United States. Over time as those tools are perfected, if the United States stays on a path where it is seen as going it alone…there will increasingly be alternatives that will chip away at the centrality of the United States.

IT IS easy to dismiss liberals’ naivete at the end of the Cold War. An era of easy interdependence, of global flows of finance and information overwhelming national borders, and of disaggregated global manufacturing turned rapidly into something very different. Firms built a vast private infrastructure for their own purposes, not realizing how easily it could be turned into an architecture of domination. Global networks were twisted into a strangler’s cord; supply chains were reforged into manacles. Dominium unwittingly manufactured the tools of a new American imperium.

Yet the administrators of this new system are now falling victim to their own overweening hubris. It might well have been possible for America to maintain its control of global architecture through intelligent forbearance. Before the Snowden revelations, key officials among America’s European allies were just as eager to drink from the spigot of Internet surveillance as their counterparts in the NSA. Europe supported delinking Iran from the SWIFT system in 2012. Now, the Trump administration seems to be gambling that it can turn the infrastructure into a means of disciplining allies and pressing SWIFT, which is a European organization, into service against Iran, despite the express wishes of European governments. Some commentators have even proposed that the United States personally sanction the senior European diplomats who set up INSTEX in order to cow Europe into submission. The Trump administration is now contemplating terminating the waiver on Title III of the Helms-Burton Act. This would allow U.S. citizens to sue foreign entities with holdings in Cuba in U.S. courts, which could lead to a general flight of foreign financial institutions from the U.S. dominated system. Such strong-arm tactics presume that other states have no other option than to accept U.S. infrastructural hegemony. In fact, these tactics are provoking states to insulate themselves from coercion, or even to start creating their own alternative architectures.

Indeed, the United States itself will withdraw from some aspects of global interdependence as it realizes how communal plumbing endangers its own security. The recent alarm over the Chinese communications firm Huawei is prompted by the fear, as fbi Director Chris Wray describes it, that we ought to be deeply concerned about the risk of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks. That provides the capacity to exert pressure or control over our telecommunications infrastructure. It provides the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information. And it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage.

This has led the United States, Japan, New Zealand and Australia to limit or block Huawei—seen as the market leader on price and quality—from helping to build new 5G communications systems. Despite a barnstorming tour of European capitals by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in February, other key allies, including the United Kingdom, have resisted U.S. pressure to exclude Huawei from government contracting. The United States now threatens that it will refuse military cooperation with countries that do not have a secure technological infrastructure, driving a wedge between Anglo-American intelligence partners and provoking counter-pressures from Chinese officials who demand that their firms have market access. Allies are not capitulating as the administration would like. Ulrik Trolle Smed, chief cybersecurity advisor to the European Commission, recently stated that “[a] complete ban” is not “the European way.”

These pressures and counter-pressures are only going to get worse. The United States, its allies and its major adversaries are beginning to confront a very difficult truth. The backbone networks of the modern globalized economy have become major national security issues. Addressing their vulnerabilities would require a profound remaking of the global economy and retreat of sensitive aspects of manufacturing back behind national borders, or within tightly knit alliance structures. For example, the United States depends on complex technological supply chains that rely on cheap components from efficient Chinese manufacturers. It is very hard to be sure that components are not compromised. China suffers from similar vulnerabilities vis-à-vis the United States (the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations team is notoriously skilled at gimmicking computer equipment), as do other states.

These same problems afflict global financial and information networks such as the Internet, and disputes are likely to erupt as states seek variously to weaponize them, to withdraw from them, to build alternatives, and to persuade or bully allies and third parties to go along with their preferred approaches. Just as America discovered the power of these infrastructure systems in a series of steps and missteps, other states are beginning to experiment with responses. Without more attention to the politics of the plumbing, and how and when to use it, the consequences are more likely to involve mutually reinforcing paranoia and over-reaction than cool ratiocination. The only thing worse than a mad emperor is several of them, each at odds with all the others.

The fights over the SPV and Chinese technology firms are only the beginning of a much broader set of infrastructure disputes as America’s accidental empire devolves into bitter wrangling between multiple rival imperiums, likely leading to further splintering and contention between regional infrastructural systems. Plumbing problems did not lead to the decline and fall of the Roman empire. They might, however, help precipitate the decline and fall of America’s.

Henry Farrell is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

Abraham Newman is a Professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government.

Image: Reuters