## Metadata - Author: [[Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman]] - Full Title: Underground Empire - Category: #books ## Highlights - According to an NSA estimate, by 2002 less than 1 percent of global Internet bandwidth passed between two regions of the world without passing through the United States. ([Location 149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BST43C5D&location=149)) - In the late 1990s, when the Internet and global finance were taking off, China had barely begun to reconnect with the world and had little time to shape how the world’s infrastructure evolved. Judged by the size of its economy, China was a global power. Judged by its influence over global economic networks, it was at best an also-ran. ([Location 1640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BST43C5D&location=1640)) - Gerhard Schröder, the former Social Democratic chancellor of Germany, was notoriously eager to help Russian companies build Europe’s energy infrastructure. A year before he lost the chancellorship, he told his biographer that he wanted to “make money” when he left politics. Russian energy giants like Gazprom and Rosneft happily helped him achieve his ambition, paying him generously for his connections. ([Location 1715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BST43C5D&location=1715)) - The EU relied on America for security, Russia for energy, and China for trade. ([Location 1719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BST43C5D&location=1719)) - The “four freedoms” promised in the EU’s founding treaty—free movement in goods, services, money, and people—were its adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, genetic building blocks whose combinations spelled out the code of the greater organism. ([Location 1875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BST43C5D&location=1875)) - Smith and other leaders didn’t want to face off against governments, but Microsoft was buffeted back and forth between U.S. officials who were angry that Microsoft wasn’t helping America’s cause and foreigners who saw Microsoft as a U.S. government pawn. A Trump adviser told Smith that since Microsoft was an “American company,” it should “agree to help the U.S. government spy on people in other countries.” ([Location 2323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BST43C5D&location=2323)) - Barely a month after Biden was sworn in as president, his administration ordered a hundred-day review of four critical supply chains: semiconductors, batteries, pharmaceuticals, and rare earth minerals. ([Location 2495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BST43C5D&location=2495)) - The more U.S. officials tried to pin China’s economy down, the more resistance they encountered from allies and businesses. European leaders had lost their faith in the gospel of global markets. Germany’s chancellor Scholz mournfully accepted that the notion that “close economic ties and mutual dependence would foster stability and security” had “now been destroyed.” ([Location 3010](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BST43C5D&location=3010)) - The original Sputnik moment, in 1957, spurred a political crisis in America. Worry about Sputnik quickly grew into alarm that the United States was on the wrong side of the “missile gap” because the Soviet Union seemed to have far more intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, claimed that his military was turning out ICBMs “like sausages,” and the Eisenhower administration believed that the Soviet Union had enough ICBMs to eliminate U.S. nuclear armed forces in a “single massive attack.” The missile gap was the central issue in John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and helps explain why the United States spent vast amounts of money on silicon semiconductors for its missile guidance systems. Today’s Silicon Valley is an accidental by-product of 1960s Cold War terrors. ([Location 3063](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BST43C5D&location=3063))