Economic sanctions may take a backseat to tariffs in President Donald Trump’s vision for the United States, but they are and will remain a tried-and-true javelin in Washington’s geopolitical arsenal. Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare is a welcome addition to a growing library of books that chronicle how this once-obscure tool became the defining element of modern U.S. financial and economic hegemony—and perhaps the proximate cause of the decline of that very hegemony.
Chokepoints, written by Edward Fishman, a former top sanctions official at the U.S. State Department, has much in common with other recent titles that trod similar ground—but plenty to distinguish itself too.
Economic sanctions may take a backseat to tariffs in President Donald Trump’s vision for the United States, but they are and will remain a tried-and-true javelin in Washington’s geopolitical arsenal. Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare is a welcome addition to a growing library of books that chronicle how this once-obscure tool became the defining element of modern U.S. financial and economic hegemony—and perhaps the proximate cause of the decline of that very hegemony.
Chokepoints, written by Edward Fishman, a former top sanctions official at the U.S. State Department, has much in common with other recent titles that trod similar ground—but plenty to distinguish itself too.
Stephanie Baker’s Punishing Putin covered some of the same blow-by-blow tales of the unprecedented U.S. and Western economic campaign to hamstring Russia’s economy in the wake of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Underground Empire, by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, offers an X-ray view of the technological and financial networks that create so-called chokepoints in the global economy—exactly what gives the United States its outsized sanctions power and Fishman his title. Those chokepoints include the dominance of the U.S. dollar and the New York banks and correspondent accounts that nearly all dollar transactions pass through, as well as payment systems and bank messaging platforms. In a dollar world, those who control how the dollars flow are the top dogs.
What Chokepoints does swimmingly is to bring everything together, explaining both how the United States acquired the outsized power to punish anyone, anywhere, and how it learned to use and abuse that power. It’s a delightful read on two decades of economic warfare by a former practitioner who knows exactly what he is talking about. (Full disclosure: I talk with Fishman from time to time on U.S. sanctions policy for my reporting.) It may not have stories of oligarchs and yachts, like Baker’s book did, or forensically probe the financial plumbing that underpins it all, as Farrell and Newman’s did. But for a reader looking for an accessible guide to how we got here and what is coming next, Fishman’s book is invaluable.
In decades and centuries past, geopolitical rivals were often constrained by geographical chokepoints. Wilhelmine Germany’s ambitions for a blue-water navy collided with the narrow and British-dominated exit from the Baltic Sea, thus spurring the construction in the late 19th century of the Kiel Canal to bypass that chokepoint (and turbocharging the naval race with London). China’s longstanding obsession with the chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca led it to entertain the notion of building a canal across the Malay Peninsula.
Those physical chokepoints still matter, of course: Witness Trump’s obsession with the Panama Canal or the Houthis’ disproportionate impact on shipping in the narrow waters off Yemen. But in the more financialized and interconnected global economy after the Cold War, it was financial chokepoints that became the commanding heights.
Chokepoints offers a couple of insights that are especially relevant now, as the new Trump administration seeks to redouble already-massive sanctions pressure on Russia in a bid to force a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine.
The first thing to note is that the ad hoc architects of U.S. sanctions in recent decades have always managed to find ways to use Washington’s economic and financial dominance to do what was initially unthinkable, unworkable, or deemed unwise. Consider the story that Fishman tells of the origin of modern U.S. state-directed sanctions: the campaign to bring Iran to its knees in the 2000s. Then-President George W. Bush thought it was an impossible task since Washington had already “sanctioned [itself] out of influence” over Tehran. Yet over a little less than a decade, a sprawling package of U.S. sanctions gutted Iran’s oil industry and brought Tehran to the negotiating table, where it signed a multilateral deal to pause development of its nuclear program (later jettisoned under Trump).
The latest sanctions escalation against Moscow is a case in point. At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, fear of touching Russia’s energy sector hamstrung the U.S. response, but Washington imposed progressively more creative and stiffer penalties on Moscow’s cash cows. In his final days in office, former U.S. President Joe Biden hit two of Russia’s big energy firms with sweeping new sanctions. These have inflicted pain with remarkably little blowback or economic cost for Americans, seemingly silencing the naysayers.
The second thing to note is that the Cassandras who warned about the perils of misusing U.S. sanctions power may have had a point. Fishman notes that U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who served in the Clinton administration, warned that weaponizing the U.S. dollar would be counterproductive because it would undermine the centrality of the currency. President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary, Jack Lew, left office with a similar warning, even after having overseen an expansion of U.S. sanctions power and expertise to target Iran and later Russia. Lew warned that “overuse” of sanctions was the greatest risk because it could undermine U.S. financial dominance (and the very effectiveness of sanctions). His point was simple then and telling now: The more the United States abuses its position as the dominant player in the global financial system, the more those on the receiving end will try to find workarounds or alternatives.
To the extent that U.S. economic warfare has been successful—from crimping Iran’s economy to pouring sand in the gears of the Russian war machine—it has simultaneously failed to achieve its broader strategic goals all while sowing the seeds of its own demise. Iran is closer to a bomb than it has ever been, and Russia’s war effort continues to grind down Ukrainian cities.
For now, fears that the U.S. dollar will lose its dominance remain overblown, whatever threats Trump makes about BRICS countries devising their own alternate currency. But what is real is a subtle shift among those countries—including China, Iran, and Russia—to bypass the financial chokepoints that give the dollar its starring role and U.S. sanctions their bite. For instance, China’s efforts to nudge the Middle East away from petrodollars and toward petroyuan hinges in part on technological developments in alternate payment systems that bypass Wall Street altogether. Russia, meanwhile, has built its own alternatives to U.S. and Western financial systems, which limit the sting of some financial sanctions.
But China, Iran, Russia, and others have not yet escaped the tyranny of the dollar (neither have France or Germany, which would like to). They barter or do some cross-border deals in their own currencies; they have some novel payment systems that avoid Western fingerprints entirely; and they have some banks that are air-gapped and isolated from—and thus immune to—the benefits and contagions of the U.S.-led financial system.
These are cracks in the sidewalk, but they will get wider. And what used to be a well-maintained thoroughfare for international trade, commerce, and finance will become bifurcated and broken down. The world can choose between economic interdependence, economic security, or geopolitical competition. This is what Fishman calls an “impossible trinity.” As countries embrace a vision of economic security—barriers to trade on national security grounds have recently mushroomed around the world—and face an era of geopolitical competition, something has got to give: namely, the interconnected global economy that drove so much growth over the past three decades.
The costlier part of that risk is that, as countries under siege find a way around those chokepoints (whether that process takes a few years or plays out over decades), the appeal and potency of economic warfare will recede, in favor of that other, older kind of warfare. “Someday, the Age of Economic Warfare will end,” Fishman concludes, “but we might miss it when it’s gone.”
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