The literature on weaponized interdependence shows that the United States uses its disproportionate influence over global trade and financial systems to pressure allies into supporting US strategic interests (Farrell and Newman 2019). Generally, this literature finds that the US enjoys enormous advantage in weaponizing economic networks to coerce states into following its lead. But this coercion can only go so far. In an ongoing effort to limit the rise of China and its high-tech sector, the US has struggled to push even close democratic allies into shifting away from China and its technology 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 or ignore powerful corporate constituencies to satisfy the demands of the US.

This project thus asks: What are the strategic, economic, and technological tradeoffs that allied states face as they consider supporting or resisting US decoupling efforts against China? What arguments do political and corporate actors make in the decoupling debate? Which type of arguments, strategic or economic, receive the greatest public attention and support? Which democratic allies show the most resistance to US pressure to decouple from China, and what is the apparent basis of this resistance? To answer these questions, we look at the case of the United States pressuring its Five Eyes allies—UK, 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, to date, has refused.

To examine the public debate over Huawei, we collect Twitter data over five years, focusing on the six months leading up to each country’s decision to ban Huawei. In New Zealand’s case, we collect data over the entire period. We conduct a cross-national analysis of arguments for and against decoupling. Twitter, which is popular with journalists, politicians, 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 to detect the stance of participants in a social media discussions to determine their position (for, against or neutral) on a given topic. Doing so allows us to see which priorities dominated public debate and whether priorities shifted as the debate progressed. Results from this analysis will reveal why states resist coercive efforts by a powerful ally and what some of the limits to weaponized interdependence are.