*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Daniel McDowell is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a 2021-22 Wilson Center China Fellow. His work focuses on the international politics of money and finance, with a focus on the role of the United States and China in these arenas. His first book, Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? The United States, the IMF, and the International Lender of Last Resort was published in 2017. His second book, Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. 

Where do you see the most exciting research and debates happening in your field?

I am most drawn to work being done at the nexus of security and international political economy. Those two IR subfields sort of diverged at the end of the Cold War. There have of course been people like Dan Drezner, Carla Norrlöf, Paul Poast, and others who continued working in that overlapping area, but overall, I think it was neglected. I think we are now in an exciting place where walls of separation are breaking down. 

Though it is not the only piece of work that illustrates this shift, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s International Security paper and broader research program on “Weaponized Interdependence” is a splendid example of the changing landscape. Their work reframed how we should think about economic globalization. Markets cannot escape today’s geopolitical realities like intensifying strategic competition between the US and China and the return of existential security concerns to the European continent. Fifteen years ago, most of our theories on trade, finance, and investment reduced matters to domestic political battles between interest groups with competing policy preferences. There was a much smaller role for international politics in those models. And, when international politics did enter the picture, matters of security were rarely centre stage. It is not that those models were necessarily wrong, rather they were reflective of a different moment in time when strategic and security matters objectively mattered less in the forming of foreign economic policy. But the world is changing, and so the questions we ask and the models we build need to adapt, and that is what is happening—and that makes this an especially interesting time to be doing work in IPE.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I started my PhD work in 2006 and finished it in 2012. The Global Financial Crisis erupted right in the middle of that formative period of my intellectual life. It completely reoriented my interests and shaped the research questions I began to work on. The crisis shined a light on the centrality of the US financial system, the dollar, and the Federal Reserve in the world economy. These were now undeniable and unavoidable facts that I had to deal with, even though they were not topics I entered graduate school to study. Ultimately the crisis led directly to my first book.

Homing in on issues of international currencies and finance early in my career required me to address questions of power and US-China competition sooner than I would have had I decided to study trade or other topics in IPE. So, while the answer may seem a bit simplistic, the financial crisis had a more significant impact on my interests and thinking than anything else I can think of.

What are the political risks that sanctioning regimes can have on the global status of the US dollar? What steps should the US be taking to maintain its economic status and international political influence?

This question is the subject of my second book Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash........

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