Arnout Nuijt

Edward Fishman, Chokepoints. American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare. New York, 2025

What do the US dollar, microchip technology and banks have in common? They are important weapons on the modern global battlefield, each one giving a country geopolitical power and ensuring that you can fight an opponent out of sight of the public – in another dimension. In addition to tanks, artillery, mechanized brigades, fighter jets, missiles, drones or even nuclear bombs, you need economic and financial weapons, because they ensure that you – in the style of the Chinese warlord Sun Tzu – win against your opponent without having to fight.

Chokepoints is the excellently researched first book by Edward Fishman, lecturer and researcher in international relations at Columbia University in New York. Fishman previously worked at the US Department of State (under Obama) and was involved in the preparation and imposition of economic sanctions. Fishman also wrote for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and the Washington Post.

A chokepoint usually refers to a blockade or a bottleneck, an important geographical point that an army, fleet or trade flow cannot avoid. Think of the Panama Canal, Gibraltar, the Strait of Hormuz, the Bosporus and the like. But there are also non-geographical and less visible chokepoints, namely in the economic field, in international financial transactions and in the development of the most advanced technologies. By exerting pressure on these chokepoints by imposing sanctions, fines and levies, a country in conflict can frustrate, undermine, severely punish or prevent an opponent from doing something. The front-line soldiers in this conflict are not the brave men and women who have signed up for military service in the field, but business people and executives from the financial world, who are actually looking to maximise profits, but cannot avoid the orders of their own government in the event of economic warfare.

While all attention is focused on the military lessons of the bloody trench warfare in Ukraine, which is accompanied by a horrific loss of life, and on new weapons such as drones, we should actually also be studying the phenomenon of economic warfare much more closely.

Fishman’s book chronologically covers the economic sanctions imposed by the US on Russia, Iran and China in recent decades and reads like a manual for waging economic war. He also gives tips on what to do and what not to do. When the G7 imposed sanctions on Russia, for example, which were actually intended to prevent the war in Ukraine, the negotiations took so long that the sanctions were imposed ten months too late, Fishman argues. When the package was finally ready, Putin had already earned some 220 billion USD from selling oil and gas and his war chest had been further boosted. Consensus and timing are therefore of great importance. But you cannot achieve everything you want with sanctions. Regime change, for example, the overthrow of the government of an enemy country, is never achieved with economic warfare, according to Fishman.

Chokepoints is published at a historic moment. A possible rapprochement between the US and Russia is in the offing, with the lifting of sanctions imposed by the US on Russia possibly becoming part of a grand deal between Trump and Putin. At the same time, Donald Trump has taken up a package of economic measures with unprecedented speed and friend and foe are being hit over the head with import duties, the aim of which is to create a new and more favourable geopolitical or security position for the US.

Now, we have learned in recent years that a country like China uses its business community to build a geopolitical position and make potential opponents dependent or vulnerable, or to manipulate the politics of another country. But it should be clear: the West, and the US in particular, is doing more or less the same. However, economic warfare and sanctions have meanwhile contributed to the fragmentation of the global economy. Various countries felt threatened and took countermeasures, which were perceived as threats by yet other countries.

While economic warfare itself has been practiced since time immemorial, the US decades ago discovered the power to manipulate the global economy and force companies abroad or even entire countries to conform to its wishes. While the globalized economy seemed like an autonomous machine, driven by the market, beyond the reach of traditional governments, the opposite was true. The global economy was in fact largely based on the US dollar, whose role (thanks to oil trading and international financial transactions) continued to grow, while US dominance of world trade declined relatively. Thanks to the dollar, computer technology and its banking system, the US had chokepoints that it could use with relative impunity to keep other countries under its thumb.

So while the public thought that the global economy was being governed by the market, the US had in fact taken control in a phenomenal way. This suited both Democrats and Republicans. For example, President Biden expanded the sanctions that his predecessor President Trump had imposed on the Chinese tech sector.

Trump, as Fishman stated in an interview about his publication with the British newspaper The Guardian, has shown in his first term that the US has indeed been able to do something with targeted sanctions against the rise and practices of China, including the boundless theft of American patents by the Asian country. According to Fishman, he did this in a way that did not cause major damage to economic relations between China and the US. Fishman is also positive in principle about Trump’s use of import duties to increase national security, but he does warn that these duties are a significantly weaker weapon than a package of sanctions or export restrictions.

What lessons can we learn from Chokepoints? In any case, that a strong military defence and blind trust in weapons is not everything. It is clear that every country needs to get its defence in order and invest extra for that. But any country with an open economy and exposure to geopolitical developments must also thoroughly prepare for economic warfare and precisely identify and skilfully protect its own chokepoints.

Fishman’s advice to the US is to establish a permanent council for economic warfare, with specially trained representatives from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Finance and Trade, in addition to officials from the security services and other relevant federal agencies. He also proposes that universities teach economic warfare as a subject, thereby underlining the importance of the role of economic warfare for the future.

Such a permanent council for economic warfare is perhaps a good idea for every country, because with a multidisciplinary approach you can prevent surprises and have your plans ready in the event of a threat. You no longer have to rely on crisis management or ad hoc advice and – if you are well prepared yourself – you also make yourself less dependent on allies. To enable such a council to think strategically as well as possible, you could also add a military staff officer and, because there are indications that the US might start playing with the dollar exchange rate, a high-ranking official from your central bank.

Economic globalization has made the world richer on balance, but no one has ever been able to prove that the world has also become safer, says Fishman. He sees an impossible trinity emerging in the world: economic interdependence, economic security and geopolitical competition. In his view, these three elements cannot all exist side by side at the same time. Fishman therefore expects that the need for greater economic security and increasing geopolitical rivalries will lead to economies becoming less and less intertwined and that globalization will decline sharply.

This article was translated from the original Dutch version, as published in Wynia’s Week of Amsterdam.