LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters Breakingviews) - For the past 15 years, the iPhone has been a totem of U.S. economic power. If the country is cooling on the $2.8 trillion company, it’s a potent indicator of increasingly frosty relations with the United States. Perhaps most significantly, the U.S. government realised it could use the internet to spy on adversaries and the financial system to subdue them. The tendency of capitalism to produce a handful of giant companies, many of them headquartered in the United States, helped successive administrations exert their authority. A complete severing of economic links between China and the United States is hard to imagine.

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Persons: Norman Angell, Thomas Friedman, Vladimir Putin, Edward Snowden, Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, Johns Hopkins SAIS, Putin, Biden, ”, Farrell, Newman, Donald Trump, ” Farrell, Allen Lane, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Aditya Sriwatsav Organizations: Reuters, Apple, World Trade Organization, New York Times, National Security Agency, U.S . Treasury, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown University, WTO, Huawei, BNP, Biden Administration, Intel, U.S ., European, United, Thomson Locations: China, Beijing, United States, France, Russian, U.S, North Korea, Iran, New York, Washington, Sudan, Cuba, Ukraine, America, Russia, Germany, United, Europe