Underground Empire
How America Weaponized the World Economy
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Henry Holt, 2023, 288 pages
Book Review published on: December 11, 2025
During the tense moments of the Cold War in 1984, Dr. Seuss published a story called The Butter Battle Book. It described the history of a fierce conflict against the Zook butter-side-downers from the dawn of the tough tufted prickly Snick Berry Switch to the cliffhanger ending with the Big Boy Boomeroo. In a scant few illustrated pages, it explained to a child’s understanding concepts of arms races, deterrence theory, militarism, nationalism, patriotism, propaganda, DARPA, heraldry, and the zeitgeist of Ronald Reagan’s first term standoff with the Soviet Union’s “Evil Empire.”
As I read Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s book Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy talking about coercive acts to pressure Iran into Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action talks, the kneecapping of a rising multinational corporate threat in China’s Huawei, the Western response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and American pressure on Taiwan Semiconductor to on-shore their manufacturing supply chain, I thought about how the authors were trying to describe an era of competition; that is, a war without bullets, a conflict without corpses—but, most definitely, an existence with battles and casualties, and consequences for national security. Forty years later in 2024, how would Dr. Seuss describe the modern surveillance state and global financial markets that Farrell and Newman are writing about? What colorful pictures and nonsensical rhymes might he invent to teach a seven-year-old about the world they will soon enter and that consumes their parents now?
Teaching about the international system is the task Farrell and Newman have undertaken for a collegiate-level audience, explaining a world many adults do not yet fully understand, if they even know it exists at all. Arcane bureaucratic acronyms like SWIFT, CHIPS, INSTEX, MARTI, OFAC, and CAATSA already sound as nonsensical as anything that Seuss could come up with, and yet these are the very consequential substance of the “underground empire” of hidden, seemingly innocuous, yet incredibly powerful economic and informational tools to which the United States holds the reins.
Anyone who’s read news headlines in the last fifteen years about Edward Snowden’s intelligence disclosures, or economic sanctions against nation-states and designated list individuals, has a rudimentary understanding of the leverage the United States has globally in communications and finance. Farrell and Newman dig deeply into the electronic world of payments with exhaustively notated research (20 percent of their book is endnotes and indices for the scholarly reader to dig into) trying to help their audience understand this world of nonkinetic warfare. The authors admit the economic system they discuss has largely been arrived at by accident, resulting from accumulated effects of government policy, business investment. and technological innovation, reaching back into a bipolar Cold War world often little resembling today.
But that’s part of the point—that the United States lucked into its underground empire because it had been in the right place at the right time during the second half of the twentieth century. It benefited from the founder effect and first mover advantages as changes happened on the internet and in the global economy. These trends were further spurred by 9/11 and the U.S. government’s unified response to terrorism with all means of government power: diplomatic, economic, and military. When the United States awakened to the realization that it held a stranglehold over modern telecommunications and international finance—that it had advantages in information, institutions, and technical expertise—like any king of the mountain, the United States has acted to stay on top and push down any who tried to ascend the mountain themselves.
An underlying tension in the “underground empire” is whether these are tools of compulsion or incentives to cooperation. Many of them were created through the noble intentions of adherents to democratic peace and economic peace theories. The benign intent of those who controlled these levers of power was assumed but never systemically enshrined. An underground empire and an underground republic are not the same thing.
A risk with the “underground empire” is that these tools are only useful in their scarcity: the more common it is for the United States to wield them, the greater the incentive for other countries to adopt measures that erode the effectiveness of American control over communications and financial networks. Or is this true? The authors note the experience from 2017 to 2021 as a time of “brutal and incompetent” attempts to exercise American economic power. Yet the world continued to use the dollar and American technology, even during COVID disruptions to the global order and the rise of cryptocurrency alternatives. Is it that the United States’ tools are that unassailable, or that the timescale needed to create alternatives is much lengthier than appreciated?
Of concern is how the United States manages the economic and informational tools Farrell and Newman identify. The Pentagon serves as a central hub for military power and has had decades to ponder the complexities of military coercion and the use of kinetic force. But responsibility for economic coercion is a mashup of authorities among treasury, justice, commerce, and other agencies, with no centralized place to think strategically on the topic—and previously no need to as these tools hadn’t been wielded before toward achieving coherent objectives. Increasingly though, the United States. will need to articulate its national economic security strategy and cultivate thinkers to develop doctrine as robust as the Cold War’s development of nuclear deterrence.
In their introduction, Farrell and Newman include a scope not that they will talk about managing and directing the tools of underground empire, but not how to escape the empire or what end it will bring. Much like the comparison to Dr. Seuss, and in the same sage wisdom of Gust Avrakotos’s zen master, the answer to that question is “We’ll see.”
Book Review written by: Matthew Kiefer, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas