Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare - Hardcover

Fishman, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593712978 ISBN 13: 9780593712979

Verlag: Portfolio, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

The secret history of how America turned the world economy into a weapon

It used to be that roiling another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government. 

In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top-ranking State Department sanctions official and current senior research scholar at Columbia University, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the secret history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which Washington turned the gospel of globalization on its head and transformed the world economy into a battlefield. Fishman tells the epic story of how renegades within the U.S. government built a powerful new arsenal of economic sanctions—and how an unbroken string of American presidents has relied on these mysterious weapons to confront the country’s greatest national-security threats, for good and for ill.

Taking inspiration from books such as Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World and Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, Fishman offers a thrilling account of one of the most crucial geopolitical subjects of our time, demystifying the intricate strategies the U.S. government uses to manipulate Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil to advance American interests. Fishman tells the story through the eyes of an eclectic group of bureaucratic heroes: the diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes who’ve masterminded America’s escalating economic wars against Iran, Russia, and China.

Economic warfare has become the primary way the United States seeks to solve global problems and deter its enemies. Sometimes it has achieved spectacular success, other times bitter failure, but the result we’re living with today is a new world order: an economic arms race among great powers and a fracturing global economy. Chokepoints is the definitive account of how America has pioneered this new, hard-hitting style of economic warfare, and what it means for the world.

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Edward Fishman is one of the world’s leading authorities on economic statecraft and sanctions. He teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and is a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy. He also advises companies on geopolitical issues and invests in mission-driven technology startups. Previously, he served in the U.S. State Department as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, at the Pentagon as an advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and at the U.S. Treasury Department as special assistant to the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. His analysis is regularly featured by outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR, and he frequently writes for publications such as Foreign Affairs and Politico. He holds a B.A. in History from Yale, an M.Phil. in International Relations from Cambridge, and an M.B.A. from Stanford.

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INTRODUCTION

There are places in the world that, owing to geography alone, appear repeatedly across the pages of history. The Bosphorus, the narrow waterway that cuts through the center of Istanbul and marks the boundary between Europe and Asia, is one such place. It is the passageway from the resource- ich Black Sea to the ports of the Mediterranean and the oceans beyond. It is a vital crossroads, a place where civilizations trade and jostle for power, where empires rise and fall.

In its golden age in the fifth century BC, Athens, the leading city- state of ancient Greece, depended on free navigation of the Bosphorus for access to food. Ships loaded grain from the fertile fields of Ukraine and dried fish from Crimea and sailed south through the Bosphorus toward Athens, protected on their journey by a string of imperial outposts and the fearsome Athenian navy. This fact was not lost on Athens’s biggest rival, Sparta. The twenty- seven- year Peloponnesian War came to an end when the Spartan navy destroyed the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami and seized control of the Bosphorus, severing Athens’s food supply and starving it into submission. The Bosphorus had been the Athenians’ lifeline, and the Bosphorus was where their empire met its demise.

Seven centuries later, on the banks of the same strait, the Roman emperor Constantine founded the city of Constantinople, known today as Istanbul. Constantinople grew into Europe’s largest and wealthiest metropolis, its skyline punctuated by the Hagia Sophia’s majestic dome. It served as the capital of the eastern branch of the Roman Empire for more than a thousand years until coming under Ottoman attack in the fifteenth century. After a
protracted siege, Constantinople fell, extinguishing the last embers of the Roman Empire. From its new capital on the Bosphorus, the Ottoman Empire flourished for centuries to come. The Ottomans, like their predecessors, fought hard to fend off other great powers that coveted the strait, from the Crimean War to World War I.

That history has so often been made in this one spot is no accident. The Bosphorus is the epitome of a chokepoint: a gateway so critical to international trade that controlling it confers immense power— and blocking it can bring an enemy to its knees.

On December 5, 2022, with Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine raging a few hundred miles away, an ominous scene unfolded at the mouth of the Bosphorus. As far as the eye could see, a line of colossal oil tankers, some nearly a thousand feet long, formed a maritime traffic jam. Their transit through the strait was blocked. News of the standstill spread quickly. The Bosphorus is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world today and an essential artery for the energy and food trade. Closing it for any prolonged period would unleash chaos on the global economy.

What was causing this gridlock?

It was not a hostile gunboat or battleship. Nor was it a shipping accident— an ever-present risk in the Bosphorus, whose sharp bends and fierce currents make it one of the world’s hardest waterways to navigate. Gumming up the works on that December day were new regulations, issued by the United States and its closest allies, which had gone into effect at 12:01 a.m. that morning.

Under the regulations, U.S. and European firms could no longer ship, insure, or finance cargoes of Russian oil sold for any price above $60 per barrel. The policy, known as the “price cap,” was intended to cut the Kremlin’s oil revenues and thereby undermine its war effort in Ukraine. The price cap packed a punch because trading oil without using Western services and institutions was next to impossible. A typical barrel of Russian oil was shipped aboard a European tanker whose insurance was British and whose cargo was paid for in U.S. dollars. The West had a near- monopoly on maritime insurance, in particular: its insurers covered more than 95 percent of all oil cargoes. Now, Western governments were exploiting this dominance to stem the flow of petrodollars to the Kremlin.

Turkey did not formally support the price cap, but the Turkish officials monitoring traffic through the Bosphorus were acutely aware of its implications: if a tanker was in violation of the policy, it would likely lose its insurance coverage, leaving the Turkish government vulnerable in the event of an oil spill or any other catastrophic accident. As a result, skittish Turkish officials were demanding extra proof that each tanker was fully insured before it could transit the strait, a requirement that led to the mounting congestion. A few paragraphs of regulatory jargon, published on the website of the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, had ground traffic to a halt at a vital waterway more than five thousand miles away.

It was the latest in a series of moves by Western governments to squeeze the Russian economy in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s grisly invasion of Ukraine. Every economic penalty levied against Russia in this pressure campaign was like the price cap: simple regulations, issued at the stroke of a pen by little- known American and European bureaucrats. But their effects rippled far and wide. The measures reshaped trade and financial flows, rewiring the global economy. They restructured relationships between world powers, sketching the blueprints of a new international order.
The economic offensive against Russia is part of an extraordinary evolution in U.S. foreign policy. To address the most pressing global security challenges, the United States has come to rely on an arsenal of economic weapons, chief among them sanctions, over the use of military force. Economic weapons have existed for centuries, but in the past two decades, their sophistication and impact have grown by leaps and bounds. In a world economy interconnected by half a century of globalization and neoliberal reforms, the actions of U.S. officials can send shock waves across the globe at breathtaking speed.

This is economic warfare. It is how America fights its most important geopolitical battles today. From thwarting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons to checking Russian imperialism and China’s bid for world mastery, the United States has reached into its economic arsenal to get the job done.
In the process, the world economy has become a battlefield. Its weapons take the form of sanctions, export controls, and investment restrictions. Its commanders are not generals and admirals but lawyers, diplomats, and economists. Its foot soldiers are not brave men and women who volunteer for military service but business executives who seek to maximize profits yet often find they have no option other than to obey Washington’s marching orders. And America’s strength in these battles stems not from its gargantuan defense budget but from its primacy in international finance and technology.

This is a new kind of war. But economic warfare itself is as old as history.

In 1958, Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize– winning economist and nuclear strategist, defined economic warfare as “economic means by which damage is imposed on other countries or the threat of damage used to bring pressure on them.” As Schelling pointed out, the distinction between economic and conventional war is how each is waged: Sanctioning an adversary’s bank is an act of economic war, whereas bombing that same bank is an act of conventional war. Both may aim to shut the bank down, but they seek to accomplish this goal in very different ways. Herein lies the main reason policymakers are so tempted by economic warfare: its tactics are inherently nonviolent. What makes today’s economic wars novel is the highly interdependent world economy, which amplifies their impact and makes their aftershocks hard...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593712978
• ISBN 13: 9780593712979
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 512
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Portfolio; https://www.wetones.co.uk/; ; 105 Golborne Rd; London; W10 5NL; Vereinigtes Königreich
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