Bipolar weaponised interdependence

Bipolar weaponised interdependence is the thesis that the weaponisation of global economic networks is consolidating around two rival hub powers, the United States and China, so that third states increasingly operate within, and choose between, two techno-economic blocs rather than a single hub-and-spoke system. The term is associated with Vili Lehdonvirta, Boxi Wu and Zoe Hawkins's 2025 study of global cloud infrastructure, which extends Farrell and Newman's framework from a one-hegemon world to a two-hub world while preserving spoke-state agency.

Origin and development

Farrell and Newman's original theory of weaponised interdependence described a hierarchical global economy whose critical hubs sat overwhelmingly under United States jurisdiction, yielding the chokepoint and panopticon effects. The bipolar variant asks whether a second hub is emerging. Lehdonvirta and colleagues test that proposition with original data on hyperscale cloud data centres. Payments and semiconductor networks are adjacent hypotheses, not observations established by the cloud study, and each requires separate evidence before the model is extended beyond its measured domain.

That domain lock matters. Network topology must be measured separately in each sector because hub identity, jurisdiction, switching costs and essential services differ. A two-pole pattern in cloud infrastructure does not by itself make the wider global economy bipolar.

Findings and mechanism

The study's central finding cuts against strong bloc determinism: "spoke states" retain agency. Third countries choose between US and Chinese network hubs, and their choices are shaped more by economic forces and their own strategic interests than by great-power rivalry alone. Network topology in a bipolar system is therefore negotiated rather than imposed; hub powers compete for spokes with inducements as well as denial, and a spoke's exit option to the rival hub disciplines how hard either pole can pull its chokepoints. Weaponisation in a bipolar network is consequently self-limiting in a way unipolar weaponisation was not: every act of denial advertises the value of the other bloc's infrastructure.

Contestation

Three readings of the evidence compete. The bipolar thesis holds that the cloud result may identify a broader two-hub trend, but extending it to payments or semiconductors remains a separate empirical claim. A multipolar reading counters that middle powers, including India, Gulf states and the European Union as regulator, are building or contesting hubs of their own, and that multipolarity better describes the emerging system. A fragmentation reading sees a patchwork of partial, overlapping decouplings rather than coherent blocs. The spoke-agency finding is double-edged: it moderates bloc formation, but it also implies ragged and contested boundaries. If a network were genuinely bipolar, exclusion from one pole would no longer mean exclusion from the whole network, reducing the coercive value of each chokepoint while increasing competition to win adoption. That implication is a hypothesis for other domains, not a finding transferred automatically from cloud infrastructure.

See also

Weaponised interdependence · Chokepoint effect · Hub-and-spoke network topology · Multipolarity and economic warfare · Fragmentation (geoeconomic) · Decoupling · CIPS · Compute clusters and AI datacentres (sovereign AI compute) · Economic statecraft

Sources

• Vili Lehdonvirta, Boxi Wu and Zoe Hawkins, "Weaponised Interdependence in a Bipolar World", Review of International Political Economy 32, no. 5 (2025).
• University of Oxford Research Archive, "Weaponised Interdependence in a Bipolar World" (accessed 30 July 2026).
• Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, "Weaponized Interdependence", International Security 44, no. 1 (2019).
• National Institute of Standards and Technology, *The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing* (Special Publication 800-145, September 2011; accessed 30 July 2026).