Description
This article addresses the contradictions of US political economy that have shaped its conduct in the Second Cold War. US approaches to international trade and industrial policy have in recent years undergone a series of major shifts and equally significant reversals. Driving this has been a commercial and military arms race with China over Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced manufacturing.
International Political Economy (IPE) has theorised this in two ways. Some scholars have addressed geoeconomics and how the state is weaponising the networks of globalisation. Others have emphasised how the corporate power of Big Tech and asset management have steered national security policies in their interests.
These fresh perspectives are valuable because they identify the growing fusion of commercial and security interests in a changing world order.
But they often problematically treat state and corporate power as symbiotic. The tension of this is that the oscillations of US policy are overlooked in their significance, attributed to the unique chaos of Donald Trump.
In contrast, this paper theorises the Second Cold War through a trilemma of US imperialism. Rather than a policy conundrum of mutually exclusive strategic priorities, this trilemma frames a set of contradictions of political economy through which to interpret the crisis of US hegemony. The trilemma’s vertices are the national security state’s pursuit of an autonomous military advantage, Silicon Valley’s drive for global commercial supremacy, and civilian authorities’ construction of a military-industrial base prepared for a major confrontation.
By empirically unraveling this trilemma, the paper argues that US policy in the Second Cold War is not driven by a coherent grand strategy. It reflects a fractured global political economy adapting to the rising power of China.
