Henry Farrell: China Is Mastering the U.S.’s Own Game of Economic Power
23 Oct 2025
As Beijing rolls out sweeping new restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals—vital materials for computer chips, electric vehicles, and missile systems—one of the world’s leading thinkers on global power dynamics, APB speaker Henry Farrell, says the move marks a turning point in how nations weaponize economic interdependence.
Farrell, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, argues that China’s latest actions show it has learned to wield the same kind of economic leverage that Washington pioneered.
“China has really begun to figure out how to take a leaf from the U.S. playbook and in a certain sense play that game better than the U.S. is currently playing it,” Farrell told The New York Times. “Washington is now facing an adversary that can threaten substantial parts of the U.S. economy,” Farrell said, calling the moment a “more delicate stage of mutual interdependence.”
This concept—that Farrell and co-author APB speaker Abe Newman have famously called “weaponized interdependence”—describes how nations exploit their position at key nodes in global networks to exert coercive power. In the past, this meant U.S. control over finance, data, and technology. Now, Farrell says, China’s dominance in critical minerals gives it a comparable form of leverage.
Henry Farrell provides a lens for understanding today’s rare-earth crisis not only as a commodity shortage, but also as a confrontation over network power in the global economy. In his keynotes, he frequently emphasizes that what once seemed like a benign economic interconnection can turn into a site of geopolitical struggle.