Underground Empire is a recent, sticky phrase for a particular account of U.S. global power: an empire built less from formal colonies or obvious territorial rule, and more from control over the hidden “plumbing” of the world economy and information networks - penguin.co.uk 
In this sense, “underground” means infrastructural rather than secretive: payment rails, data routes, legal jurisdictions, sanctions tooling, compliance chokepoints, and corporate network hubs that are normally treated as neutral market machinery, until they are used as levers of state power - chathamhouse.org
# Farrell and Newman’s “Underground Empire”
The phrase is most strongly associated with political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, who use it to describe how the United States can turn global economic and information networks into instruments of surveillance, coercion, and bargaining power, often without declaring that it is doing “grand strategy” at all - henryfarrell.net
Their book frames this as a kind of network imperial power: not a map of coloured territories, but a map of hubs, chokepoints, standards, and jurisdictions that can be activated through Sanctions, financial compliance, platform governance, and intelligence access - waterstones.com
A key intellectual bridge into this framing is their work on Weaponized Interdependence, which argues that globalization produces asymmetric network structures (hub-and-spoke patterns) that states can exploit for “networked coercion” - henryfarrell.net
# The “underground grand strategy” reading
One reason “Underground Empire” travels as a term is that it lets other thinkers talk about U.S. strategy without relying on older “hegemony” language or assuming a single master plan. Daniel W. Drezner, for example, explicitly riffs on the idea as “America’s underground grand strategy,” treating it as a way to understand how tools built for market integration became instruments of geopolitical leverage - danieldrezner.substack.com
Reviewers often emphasise the same twist: much of this infrastructure was not originally designed as an imperial toolkit, but once the U.S. (and U.S.-aligned institutions) sat at central nodes, it became possible to monitor, throttle, exclude, or punish at scale, using mechanisms that look administrative, technical, or legal rather than overtly military - engelsbergideas.com
# How the term points at U.S. global political strategy
In this usage, “Underground Empire” names a strategic pattern: governing through the substrate. It highlights how U.S. power can operate through “default settings” of the international system, such as financial messaging, dollar clearing, export controls, and compliance regimes that reach far beyond U.S. borders - cambridge.org
A common example in discussions around this framing is the U.S. capacity to apply pressure via secondary sanctions and network chokepoints, where third parties are effectively forced to choose between access to U.S.-centric systems and dealing with a targeted state or firm - cdn.penguin.co.uk
Because it is a strategy of leverage rather than occupation, it also creates strategic blowback risks: states and firms may try to route around U.S.-linked nodes, build parallel infrastructure, or harden against surveillance and coercion, which can erode the very centrality that made the leverage possible - e-ir.info
# A note on other meanings
There is an older and very different pop-cultural meaning: Infocom’s Zork is set in the ruins of the “Great Underground Empire,” a fantasy labyrinth where “underground empire” is literal world-building rather than a theory of geopolitics - wikipedia.org
This accidental overlap can be useful: it reminds you that empires can persist as architecture long after the ideology is forgotten. In the Farrell/Newman sense, the “dungeon” is the world economy itself: a maze of corridors, protocols, and gates that most people never see until the doors start locking - penguin.co.uk