The Limits of Weaponized Interdependence: The Case of Huawei and the Five Eyes

• In Event: Military and Economic Interdependence

Abstract

The literature on weaponized interdependence shows that the United States uses its disproportionate influence over global trade, information technology, and financial systems to pressure allies into supporting US strategic interests (Farrell and Newman 2019). Generally, this literature finds that the US enjoys enormous advantages in weaponizing economic and cyber networks to coerce states into following its lead (Drezner et al. 2021). To be sure, scholars recognize that this coercion can only go so far, but research, to date, has not fully explored the limits of weaponized interdependence. This project seeks to address this gap.

In an ongoing effort to curtail China’s cyber capabilities, the US has struggled to push even its closest democratic allies into shifting away from Chinese information technology and supply chains. This is because decoupling requires not only the cooperation of multiple governments but also many private firms. Democratic allies cannot instantly abandon long-term international investments, ignore powerful corporate constituencies, or disregard majority opinion to satisfy the demands of the US. We thus ask: What are the security-versus-economic trade-offs that allied states face as they consider supporting or resisting US decoupling efforts against China? Do national security claims or economic concerns receive the greatest public attention and support, and how do priorities and arguments change as debate over decoupling progresses? Which democratic allies show the most resistance to US pressure on decoupling, and what is the apparent basis for this resistance?

To answer these questions, we look at the case of the US pressuring its Five Eyes allies--the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand--to ban telecommunications equipment from Huawei. The decision to ban or accept Huawei triggered extensive public debate in these four countries. On the one hand, the US threatened to withhold critical intelligence from these allies and effectively expel them from the Five Eyes alliance should they continue their relationship with Huawei. On the other hand, banning Huawei would mean the loss of next-generation wireless services, added costs from supply chain disruptions, and retaliatory sanctions from China. In the end, Australia, Canada, and a very grudging UK implemented the ban; New Zealand has avoided declaring one.

To examine the public debate over Huawei, we collect Twitter data across a four-year period (2018-2022) to conduct a cross-national analysis of arguments for and against decoupling. Twitter, which is popular among journalists, political elites, and the English-speaking public, offers an ideal data source for this project. For the analysis itself, we use longitudinal topic modelling to reveal topics based on tweets from each country. Among other steps, we manually verify the topics leading up to each country’s decision to ban Huawei or not. We also use a neural network model that detects the stance of participants in social media discussions to determine the position (for, against, or neutral) that participants take on a given topic. Doing so allows us to see which priorities dominated public debate and whether priorities shifted over time. Results from this analysis will help reveal which factors drive democratic allies to resist US demands and which factors limit a powerful actor’s ability to use global networks as tools of coercion.

Author

• William Bendix, Dakota State University