That set of tools is now a bit less mysterious, thanks to two political scientists, Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins and Abraham Newman of Georgetown. Their book published last month, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the Global Economy,” reveals how the United States benefits from a set of institutions built up late last century as neutral means of streamlining global markets.

These institutions include the dollar and the bank-messaging system known as Swift (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which is based in Belgium and run by an international board but vulnerable to American pressure. It helps that the rise of the internet has made the United States home to much of the wired world’s circuitry and infrastructure, including, in our time, some of the major cloud computing centers of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google.

The United States now has the ability to survey and influence the world’s communications and supply chains, should it choose to. After the Sept. 11 attacks, it chose to. It bent the institutions to which it had access into a defensive (as it then saw things) weapon in the war on terror. “To protect America,” Mr. Farrell and Mr. Newman write, “Washington has slowly but surely turned thriving economic networks into tools of domination.”