Fragile Power: How Weaponized Interdependence Pushes the World towards Collpase

What happens when the connections making the modern world prosperous become instruments of coercion? Globalization rested on a powerful assumption: economic interdependence would make conflict costlier, cooperation more rewarding, and the international system more stable. Nations became deeply dependent on one another for energy, finance, technology, trade, critical minerals, supply chains, and infrastructure. The result was unprecedented economic integration—but also a new and underappreciated form of vulnerability. Today, those vulnerabilities are being weaponized.Fragile Power examines how interdependence has evolved from a source of mutual benefit into a tool of geopolitical power. It explores how states that control critical nodes in global networks can exploit those positions to impose costs, restrict access, shape others' choices, and exercise influence far beyond traditional measures of military or economic power. From American financial sanctions and semiconductor export controls to China's control of critical supply chains, Russia's use of energy dependence, and Taiwan's strategic position in advanced semiconductor manufacturing, the book shows how economic networks become instruments of coercion, but also how disruptions can propagate through interconnected systems, producing cascading failures, market instability, political pressure, and strategic realignment.But weaponized interdependence is not simply a story of powerful states exploiting weaker ones. Fragile Power examines the strategies available to vulnerable states, including diversification, strategic reserves, redundancy, technological self-sufficiency, alternative financial systems, regional cooperation, and collective action. It asks whether states can reduce their vulnerabilities without destroying the openness and efficiency that made interdependence valuable in the first place. Drawing on the concepts of network power, chokepoints, cascade propagation, phase transitions, tipping points, hysteresis, and path dependence, the book argues that some of the most consequential vulnerabilities of the twenty-first century are embedded not in individual countries or sectors, but in the architecture of the networks connecting them.The geopolitical consequences are profound. U.S.-China technological competition, the Russia-West confrontation, regional conflicts, economic bloc formation, and the rise of middle powers are reshaping the global system. Countries such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are pursuing greater strategic autonomy through hedging and multi-alignment, while the wider international system moves toward selective decoupling and competing technological, financial, and economic ecosystems.The central paradox is clear: the same interdependence that creates prosperity can create vulnerability; the measures that increase resilience can simultaneously reduce efficiency, innovation, and cooperation. The emerging world is thus unlikely to be defined by either complete globalization or complete decoupling. Instead, it is moving toward a more complex and contested equilibrium in which states remain interconnected while increasingly seeking to control, diversify, protect, and sometimes weaponize the networks on which they depend.Fragile Power is ultimately a study of power in a world where influence increasingly flows through the networks that connect the global economy—and through the ability to control who can access them, who can be excluded, and how quickly their vulnerabilities can be exploited. The question confronting the international system is no longer whether interdependence will survive. It is whether its benefits can be preserved without allowing its networks to become the infrastructure of geopolitical conflict.