The Underground Empire is not an "elaborate and secret plot"

The actual problem is that no-one is really in control

This Substack has gone quiet the last several weeks amidst the madness of book launch. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy is now out! Buy it at your local bookshop, or Bookshop.org, or Amazon.com, or Amazon.co.uk or at … just buy it!

Abe and I have been busily writing elsewhere - the idea of a book launch being that you need to launch repeated barrages of media to get anyone to pay attention. So far, we’ve been in the Wall Street Journal, Insider, the Irish Times and Time, and there is plenty more in the works.

And we got our first review, in the Financial Times! It says some really nice things: “captivating — the stuff of thrillers," and has kind words for our discussion of the intricacies of the Huawei situation. But it also suggests that we are arguing something that we don’t actually think is true - that US dominance is “an elaborate and secret plot.” The review faults us for not delivering on this thesis, especially in the final parts of the book.

Being an author and hence human and imperfect, my immediate reaction is to purr at the compliments and growl at the criticisms. My more considered response is that if a reviewer read it this way, then it is a possible reasonable reading (i.e. it is in good faith but wrong) and by extension that many others are likely to read it in the same way. We have quite deliberately written the book to be, as the cliche goes, a gripping read. That may make it easier to be pulled along by the drive of the narrative and miss the underlying argument, which is not actually about secret plots.

So read this not as a grumpy response - but as a clarification of what we in fact wanted to say and argue in the book. I am actually far less worried about people like the FT reviewer criticizing us, than about others taking up the book’s arguments enthusiastically as proof positive of grand global conspiracy.

Our key claim is that the underground empire we describe - the power that the US has acquired over the financial and technological systems of the world - is not the result of a secret plot. In the opening sections of the book, we describe two visions of the world of globalized networks - Thomas Friedman’s flat world hypothesis, and Vladimir Putin’s theory that the Internet was a CIA project aimed to undermine regimes like his own. As we put it:

The truth is more interesting and complicated than either Putin’s world of conspiracies or Friedman’s two-dimensional flatland. If the Cold War hadn’t ended, the great era of global network building would never have begun. A world that was divided into mutually distrustful power blocs would never have allowed networks to entangle their economies together. Furthermore, it wasn’t the United States government that built the networks. Following the collective wisdom of the day, officials believed that their job was to get out of the way of private enterprise, which was overwhelmingly U.S.-based or U.S.-focused.

What we stress throughout is how all of this came about in a completely haphazard and unplanned way. Businesses had no idea that they were constructing the means of government compulsion. Nor did governments pay much attention until the US started trying to figure out what the hell it could do after the September 11 attacks. And then, when officials did start to do things, they did not come up with any coordinated plan. Instead, as we describe it, they improvised as best as they could, trying to deal with immediate crises and emergencies, without ever having much time to consider the deeper logic of what they were doing. That hasn’t changed particularly, and that is the problem we want to identify and address.

The opening chapter introduces the notion of “path dependence” - how initial patterns become self reinforcing through feedback loops. It then describes how

governments, too, can follow paths without anticipating where they lead. As departments and agencies developed new tools, they kept on finding new uses for them. Whenever a new use was discovered, it created a possible precedent for others.

That - rather than secret plots - is the engine that propels our narrative. There aren’t many real villains in our story (readers will, however, discern that we don’t think much of Donald Trump). Instead, it’s a story of people’s actions cumulating in a system that is bigger than any of them. At one point we use the term “the tragedy of globalization,” and it is, indeed, a tragedy in the classical Greek sense of the term - a story where characters do what they must, for what may seem to them (and what may in fact often be) laudable purposes, but culminating in an outcome that leaves everyone unhappy, “a new spiral of economic confrontation [that] is slowly gathering strength.” In our concluding chapter, we sum up what has happened thus:

Those who speak on behalf of the empire talk a good game. Politicians’ speeches and officials’ memoirs make its history seem like a continuous string of anticipated successes. Some tell a very different story in private conversation. Ultimately, America’s underground empire wasn’t the product of any grand master plan. Instead, it emerged half by accident, as officials tried to deal with one damn problem after another.

When the United States slapped at North Korea by designating Banco Delta Asia, no one expected it would show the way to sever Iran’s access to global finance. The Iran sanctions themselves seemed to bump up against the ceiling of the possible; unique, and unprecedented measures to address a unique and unprecedented problem. That ceiling has become the floor on which even more ambitious structures of domination have been built.

That is the thread that should guide you through the labyrinth of the underground empire.

In a strange way, conspiracy theories are comforting. They suggest that the difficulties and perplexities of the world we find ourselves thrown into are the product of deliberate agency; that someone, somewhere is to blame, and if only we can find out who they are and stop them, everything will suddenly get better. The story that we tell in Underground Empire is a fundamentally different kind of story - and perhaps the confusion arises because the kind of narrative form that we use is rarely put to this purpose. It isn’t a story of secret plots - most of what we talk about is out in the open, discussed in the business pages of newspapers like the FT, New York Times and Washington Post. It is the story of how a system came into being and how no-one, really, is in control of it. As we explain:

From outside, the underground empire seems like a relentless machine of domination, the product of decades of careful engineering. From inside, it looks quite different, a haphazard construction lashed together from ad hoc bureaucratic decisions and repurposed legal authorities. It still holds, somehow. The United States understands the world economy far better, and can manipulate it more easily, than its allies and adversaries. Yet as the contradictions mount, the risk of catastrophic failure grows.

The worries described in the final part of our book are not about secret masters plotting to control everything. They are of a system that has taken on its own logic as it has expanded, and become impossible for anyone to control. As the Underground Empire has come out into the open, the actions of the US and the reactions of adversaries like China are creating a feedback loop, which could go in some very bad ways.

So that is the book that we wrote and the argument we wanted to make. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the end was dissatisfying to the reviewer, given their starting assumptions. There isn’t any grand reveal of the man behind the curtain as there would be in a book about secret plots. Instead, there’s a Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo moment, when you are asked to realize that no-one is really in charge, and that this, most emphatically, is its own kind of problem. But there are many readers who likely may not see this. We didn’t anticipate this reading - you don’t know what people are going to do with your argument until it gets out there - although you can confidently anticipate that they will do unexpected things. Hence, it may be useful to have this precis publicly available, to single out the main thread of the argument we want to make (and to make sure that criticisms of it are as pointed and useful as possible).