Author: Shahjahan Tahir
With no dust settling on escalatory rounds of tariffs and rare-earth export controls, the increasingly conflictual US-China technonationalist rivalry is a central challenge of our times. This feature essay compares various perspectives in making sense of the rivalry, refusing the twin temptations of liberal (over)optimism and neo-realist fatalism. Rather than treating interdependence as a structural moderator or hegemonic transition as an inevitable trap, the essay illustrates how the rivalry persists and perpetuates as interdependence itself becomes weaponised.
Drawing on Bratton’s (2016) notion of the Stack, a multi-layered organization of digital capitalism, the essay illustrates the rivalry operates across layers, from undersea cables and semiconductor supply chains to cloud infrastructures and rare-earth mineral politics. Confrontations, across layers, are already underway, diffused and cumulative. The emerging literature on state-platform capitalism (Rolf and Schindler, 2023) further illuminates how profit accumulation and security imperatives have been structurally fused, embedding strategic confrontations within the rivalry’s functioning and trajectory. Renewed statist re-marketisation across the global South has produced novel forms of poly-aligned agency, as peripheral states are also actively rescaling their political economies to extract leverage from the rivalry while absorbing its pressures.
The essay ultimately frames the impasse as structurally unstable coexistence, whose trajectory is shaped by the contested political projects of transnational class coalitions navigating a fragmented yet deeply integrated global order.
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