Henry Farrell: prediction

Transcript context

…In a world of increasing weaponized interdependence, exactly to where does the power shift? Is it to the big nations, to the nasty nations, to the nations willing to move first? Nations or unions? What’s your general take on who is gaining in status and influence? Oh, very, very good question. I would say that what we’re seeing at the moment is a transition from a world of one big nation — which is the United States, which has had to a very great degree a near monopoly on this stuff — to a group of nations, including the United States, but also including China, European Union, India perhaps, although people don’t pay much attention to it. I would be interested to know much, much more about what India is doing in this space. And also with Russia playing less as a significant power that is able to exert much influence than as a spoiler trying to figure out ways to screw things up for everybody else. So I think that we are moving from a world of unipolarity — to use the standard term that international relations scholars use — to a world of multipolarity. And one of the things that we can expect from that is that multipolarity tends to lead to a lot of danger of things screwing up and things going wrong. When one looks at how the US has done this over the last number of years, it has managed to prosecute its interests reasonably well while not pushing other countries too far, until the Trump administration. That’s not true anymore. And I think that as other countries come in, many of which are less sophisticated about thinking about what kinds of things they can or cannot do without messing up things for other countries or for their own companies, we’re going to see far, far more mistakes being made. This is especially true because nobody really understands what the networks are, but they’re trying to weaponize. There was one very interesting example of this, which happened with the United States, in fact, when it went after Oleg Deripaska, who is one of the Russian oligarchs. Deripaska had a big interest. He effectively had control of the Russian aluminum industry. The US Treasury Department OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control] sanctioned Deripaska but didn’t realize that when it was sanctioning Deripaska’s companies, it was going to mess up the entire West European car manufacturing industry, which relies upon specific aluminum products that only Deripaska’s companies can create. This led to this very, very complicated ballet dance in which the Treasury sought to both extend the sanctions and to specify them in ways that would allow for the unwinding, at least the nominal unwinding, of Deripaska’s formal control of the company, so as to create an exit strategy. But one can see that, as we’re going to have more and more countries trying to do this stuff, and as they are doing so in a competitive way rather than one country trying as a unipolar power to impose it on everyone else, that the possibilities of mistakes being made and mistakes leading to escalation, and minor trade wars blowing up into substantial spats and even outright economic warfare — I think that that possibility is going to get much, much worse. Arguably, dominant firms are easier to regulate. And since you seem to favor some kinds of additional regulation on the major tech companies, does this mean we’re too worried about monopoly, that we actually want to keep around a few dominant firms, and that if we split them up into many small parts, there would be more chaos or more fake news or more privacy violations? If some parts of what they do are bad, and you get more competition in the bad, don’t we just want to put in GDPR barriers to entry, not quite public utilities, but keep them big and fat and happy and somewhat not so dynamic, yes or no?…

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