For decades the term “chokepoints” has referred to places, usually narrow maritime passages, through which a great deal of traffic needs to move: the Panama Canal, the Bosporus, the Strait of Malacca. In the over-quoted words of Sir Walter Raleigh: “Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.” Despite the technological revolutions of the past centuries, this remains true: over 80 percent of world trade by volume travels by sea, and disruptions such as the Ever Given container ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal—or the blockades of the Strait of Hormuz—still send ripples through the global economy. For a century American naval strategy and geopolitical dominance have relied in part on control over important maritime routes.
The central contention of Edward Fishman’s book Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare is that the era of hyperglobalization has spawned new, more abstract kinds of chokepoints alongside the traditional ones. These bottlenecks appear in the opaque circuitry of finance: the online balance sheets of banks, the transactions of payment systems, and the servers filled with account data. Because a huge share of global finance is either denominated in dollars or runs through US financial institutions, international banks cannot afford to lose access to the American economy. As an extension of its foreign policy, the US can freeze deposits and Treasury bonds held by other nations—as they did to Russia in 2022—or levy penalties on foreign institutions that do business with adversaries.
Building on the influential work of the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman,* Fishman argues that the chokepoints of what they call an “underground empire” are an almost accidental outcome of the process of American-led globalization. As it set out to connect the world in a post–cold war era, the US ended up with new tools at its disposal, from sanctions to investment bans. US policymakers realized that they had their hands on the spigot of a global system of trade and exchange that ran on the dollar; the power to let it flow could also be the power to seal it off.
Fishman’s book, drawn in part from his days working in the State Department and the Treasury, profiles a generation of twenty-first-century American policymakers giddy at the prospect of a new form of warfare without guns. Economic warfare began as a discrete effort to change the behavior of adversaries, but over time it became a means for industrial policy to protect America’s waning competitive edge—from China, in particular. The twist in the story—one it is not entirely clear that Fishman understands, even as he narrates it—is that the project was a failure. It has left the US arguably more isolated and vulnerable than ever.
The modern economic arsenal was born amid a shooting war. The World War I–era Trading with the Enemy Act allowed the seizure of German assets in the US, from the Aspirin patent to the Hamburg–America shipping line. Eventually it was used to establish the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in 1950, after the “loss” of China to Communist rule. The OFAC worked as an organ of the cold war, enforcing trade embargoes against North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam and then, under Reagan, targets like Nicaragua and Libya. As the cold war ended, the focus shifted from high politics to narco-trafficking and terrorism; the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, first published in the 1980s, was aimed at drug networks (it was for a time known as “La Lista Clinton”) and, after the September 11 attacks, suspected terrorists. At this point the United States’ economic weapons were embargoes, which cut off trade with entire countries, and sanction lists, which froze the assets of designated firms and individuals and barred them from doing business with Americans.
An essential innovation came in 1996: the creation of “secondary sanctions.” The Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of that year, Fishman writes,
was unique because it aimed America’s sanctions cannon not at Iran directly but rather at foreign companies doing business with Iran, many of which were headquartered in countries that were US allies.
With the net of guilt spread more widely, doing business with nations targeted by the US now meant risking penalties or even exclusion from the American market, turning yourself, in effect, into a target of sanctions too. The message, Fishman writes, was blunt: “Get on board with our Iran policy or your companies will suffer the consequences.”
Some neoliberals bristled at this blurring of the boundary between politics and economics. The EU’s trade commissioner, Leon Brittan, pushed a law forbidding European companies from complying. But the US barreled forward; secondary sanctions and so-called blocking sanctions—which included asset freezes and transaction bans—became tools of US policy regardless of approval from the United Nations or consultation with allies, “weaponizing America’s central role in the international financial system.”
Straits and canals can be definitively closed, but the US found it more difficult to effectively control the new chokepoints. It pressured—and occasionally threatened—its traditional allies to make them fall in line, but emerging powers were more likely to seek work-arounds. The book is marked by a motif: America declares premature victory before China, skeptical of what it calls America’s “long-arm jurisdiction,” becomes the backdoor partner for the targets of economic weapons. Across the sanctions period, China has remained a top Iranian oil client; this pattern repeated after the most spectacular deployment of economic weaponry against Russia, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As the US tried to limit the exports of countries like Iran and Russia, it saw oil escaping to China directly and seeping elsewhere through transshipment points like Dubai, whose rise in this period was driven in part by its function as a hub for evading sanctions. Even in the world of “weaponized interdependence” described by Farrell and Newman, trade and finance often found ways to move through networks when single arteries were blocked.
The efficacy of these weapons waned over time. As Fishman writes, “Sanctions are like antibiotics: they work well when used correctly but cause a host of problems when used excessively or inappropriately.” Economic weapons almost always ended up having perverse effects. They rarely incapacitated their target altogether; the worst effects were borne not by the regime but by the population, especially the poor, who are the least insulated from price and supply shocks.
And being locked out of the American financial system or the supply of critical high-tech components forced countries to develop greater local capacity; the governments of Iran, Russia, and China began to expect the deployment of the United States’ economic weapons and launched projects to strengthen their own markets, building up cash and gold reserves, reducing their exposure to US financial markets and Treasuries, and creating alternative credit card companies and payment processors that were owned and controlled domestically.
In the 2000s China was the guilty secret of American consumer prosperity, pitiable and slightly distasteful. The natural hierarchy of economic function was inscribed on the back of the iPhone when it was released in 2007: “Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China.” China was expanding its manufacturing, and American consumers were profiting. But the next year China’s share of global manufacturing quietly outpaced that of the US for the first time. (The Xiaomi phone, designed and assembled in China, was released soon after.) The US had lost its edge—though few Americans noticed at the time.
Once Washington policymakers started to pay attention, they were shocked by the breakneck pace of Chinese industrialization and modernization. In 2018 an unclassified report from the Defense Department concluded that “China’s economic strategies…pose significant threats to the US industrial base and thereby pose a growing risk to US national security,” and indeed during his first term Donald Trump levied the first round of steel and aluminum tariffs against China in the name of “national security.” Other measures followed: in 2019 Huawei was added to the Commerce Department’s “Entity List,” meaning there were tight controls on US companies exporting components to the firm. In the following years those export controls were expanded, which included designating Huawei, ZTE, and some other Chinese firms as security risks in US communications infrastructure. A few years later the Biden administration, which tightened restrictions on semiconductor technology in particular, described its strategy as an attempt to construct “a small yard and a high fence”: a rearguard action to preserve America’s dominance against a surging China.
This was a dramatic shift from the traditional use of economic weaponry as a tool to bring rogue nations into line. The American economic arsenal was now being used to hobble the development of one of its biggest trading partners, inaugurating a phase of globalization based not on openness but on control. Fishman shows how the tools of counterterrorism and narcotics enforcement were refashioned into market barricades.
The willingness of the US to go it alone surprised many European countries, who suddenly found themselves part of what was increasingly being called a new cold war. Countries like Germany, which had invested early in the People’s Republic of China, where nearly one third of Volkswagens were sold, wondered how their export model was supposed to work if they went along with the great tariff wall against a major trading partner. The UK had joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, entered the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and even planned to allow Huawei to “build the backbone,” as Fishman writes, of its 5G network—until Washington forced a reversal at enormous cost. The Americans did not work too hard at persuasion. The language of national security they used to justify the export control regime left little space for debate.
Europeans at the Munich Security Conference in 2020 were shocked by Democratic house speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bellicose rhetoric. “Does it mean that you agree in substance with the China policy of President Trump?” one audience member asked. When Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated the call to block Chinese investment and contracts, a former Estonian president responded, “Are you offering an alternative? Are you going to subsidize Nokia and Ericsson? I mean, what do we get? What is it that we should do other than not use Huawei?” To the Europeans, falling in line with America’s economic warfare was just patronage without benefits—loyalty that demanded self-deprivation.
“Whether you like it or not, the global economy is the big ocean that you cannot escape from,” Xi Jinping said at Davos in 2017.
Any attempt to cut off flows of capital, technologies, products, industries, and people between economies, and to channel the waters of the ocean back into isolated lakes and creeks [is] simply not possible, and indeed it runs counter to the historical trend.
One of the great reversals of our era is that, in the course of wielding sanctions and tariffs, the United States has also ceded to its rival the slogans of free trade and globalization that it once repeated endlessly.
Fishman joined Barack Obama’s government in the early 2010s as it pioneered the repurposing of sanctions, investment controls, and export license bans in order to exert American influence. Chokepoints recounts the maturation of its writer alongside this emerging style of economic statecraft. Told from the perspective of a participant-observer, the book is also relatively uncritical. Fishman moves through the different phases of these developments with brisk profiles of the men involved—and they are all men—that celebrate their willingness to take on unprecedented challenges and their fearless attitude about experimenting with how far sanctions and other economic means could be pushed to secure American goals.
Fishman’s intimacy with many of the dramatis personae is both an advantage and an obstacle to seeing the deep currents under the shift. He is predisposed to seeing his subjects as motivated by civic virtue. He is also prone to giving them the benefit of the doubt and to portraying international politics as a series of duels, with the US facing off against adversaries across the negotiating table. Almost all the photographs in the book feature men in suits and ties behind podiums and microphones. This is CNN history, in which talking points are repeated exactly as delivered by the press secretary and backroom details often include how many espresso pods someone pushed into a backpack or whether someone has salt-and-pepper hair.
Base motives are never entertained. Corruption, collusion, and inside dealing are unimaginable within the halls of US power—even when the revolving door sent people like Stuart Levey from designing sanctions inside the government to lucrative gigs advising banks on how those sanctions worked. Trump himself, usually depicted as wrecker-in-chief, is treated here with decorum. He is mentioned by his full name about as often as Matt Pottinger, his China hand, whose fluent Mandarin is praised more than once. We are in the extended universe of Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk, in which competent civil servants are making tough decisions in the American interest.
By contrast, adversaries are treated with blanket suspicion. In both the introduction and the conclusion, China is charged with a “bid for world mastery,” yet nowhere in the book is there evidence that China is seeking to dominate the globe. As any skeptical reader will see, the one power clearly determined to preserve mastery is the US, wielding tools that corrode the very liberal principles it professes to defend.
What kind of guardian of capitalist order undermines free trade and private property through unilateral sanctions and extraterritorial enforcement? The gap between principle and practice yawns wider with every export control and company added to the Entity List. You can almost see the eyes of America’s adversaries twinkling. As Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said in New Delhi in 2022, in reference to the US practice of freezing assets, “India must not be dependent on systems whose masters can steal your money overnight.” After the US pushed its allies to exclude Huawei’s 5G technology on security grounds, claiming fears of surveillance, the company’s chairman said mockingly, “Prism, prism on the wall: Who’s the most trustworthy of them all?” He added, “If you don’t understand this question, go ask Edward Snowden.”
What has been the outcome of what Fishman calls “the dark arts of economic warfare”? Sanctions and embargoes are instruments of de-development, preventing integration into global markets, impeding cross-border mobility for ordinary citizens of targeted countries, and increasing the cost of living as well as reducing access to potentially lifesaving medicines. Fishman writes that exceptions are always made for humanitarian reasons, but a 2025 study by The Lancet Global Health found that the annual death toll resulting from sanctions is roughly equivalent to that of armed conflict.
Structurally, America’s economic weapons have pushed its adversaries into hardening their own financial systems, accelerated the development of substitutes for American products, and forced its allies into self-sacrificial choices while offering them nothing in return. Chokepoints captures how America’s effort to maintain its global economic dominance over the past decade has backfired, leaving it more isolated and in control of a shrinking share of the global economy—reliant on undependable policy tools to preserve its edge.
And yet the book is seemingly intent on arguing the opposite. Fishman appears determined to find a logic to his colleagues’ actions that could redeem their broader strategic wisdom. “The United States has used its hold over these chokepoints to pioneer a new, hard-hitting style of economic warfare,” he declares at the beginning. By the end he concedes some setbacks but still suggests that sanctions could be expanded to pursue climate goals and regulate the responsible use of artificial intelligence.
More recently, some of the protagonists of Fishman’s story have publicly confessed regret. Daleep Singh, Biden’s deputy national security adviser, cuts a braggadocious figure in the book, putting up a poster of Muhammad Ali in his office after moving to the government from Goldman Sachs by way of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and boasting of the “knockout blow” sanctions would deliver to Russia. But on a podcast earlier this year he admitted that “we lost the global narrative”: “More than two thirds of the world’s population lives in countries that didn’t join our sanctions regime.” A through line of Chokepoints is that even American allies failed to fully understand why they were being compelled to take action, often to their own material detriment, simply for the price of their alliance with the United States. As sanctions were used ever more frequently, and without a larger plan that redistributed gains around the world, they made the United States seem unreliable.
The premise of Fishman’s book is that the new chokepoints of global finance are now the important ones for US policy and leverage. Yet the invasion of Iran is only the latest evidence that this judgment was premature. Geography still matters, and the American belief that it had found a “cheat code” for geopolitics deluded the US about its own omnipotence. It has produced an array of allies skeptical about their part in America’s economic warfare and a host of adversaries rapidly learning to defend themselves against its effects. When the US banned the export of advanced semiconductors, China threatened to cut off supplies of rare earths; Russia set up its own alternative payment system after being locked out of SWIFT; Iran is accepting toll payments at the Strait of Hormuz in cryptocurrency instead of dollars. Even the most powerful hegemon will find that if it abuses its position enough, everyone will start looking for alternatives.
English (US) · 