Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Becomes a Weapon of War
The Insight Monitor Book Club
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Review: Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War (Elliott & Thompson Limited, 2025).
BLUF: Chokepoints argues that in the 21st century, the US has leveraged control over key economic domains, such as the US dollar, global financial networks, and advanced technology supply chains, into powerful tools of geopolitical influence. The book examines how US administrations have employed tools such as sanctions and export controls to coerce rivals like Russia, China, and Iran, and through these coercive measures, have reshaped global power dynamics without resorting to traditional military force. The book also includes a stark warning: that economic interdependence will continue to unravel, making these tools less impactful.
Author Info: Edward Fishman is an international relations scholar and a former U.S. diplomat. He’s currently a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and teaches as an Adjunct Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs. He holds fellowships at both the Center for a New American Security and the Atlantic Council.
Brief Summary
In Chokepoints, Fishman shows how today’s scramble for economic security is redrawing the global map and pushing us toward the end of globalization as we’ve known it. The roots of this shift can be traced back to the Bretton Woods system established after World War II, when fixed exchange rates and the US dollar’s convertibility into gold solidified the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Even after Nixon suspended the dollar’s link to gold, the financial interdependence born at Bretton Woods endured, giving Washington unprecedented leverage over the global economy. This legacy of dollar dominance created the very chokepoints that now empower US economic warfare, but also expose the vulnerabilities that could unravel globalization in the decades ahead.
The US has weaponized its dominance over the dollar and global financial networks, turning sanctions, export controls, and other economic tools into instruments of statecraft by controlling access to the US dollar, markets, and financial systems. This has created a new geopolitical divide: countries that fear US economic warfare and try to insulate themselves from it, those more concerned about China’s growing ability to wield economic weapons, and a third camp of “swing states” seeking to straddle both worlds, which are at once influential and vulnerable.
Fishman also raises a warning: chokepoints that empower US economic warfare are becoming glaring vulnerabilities for the global economy itself. The unravelling of economic interdependence could push the world into divided blocs, peaceful for now but less stable in the long run. He argues that the US must professionalize its approach to economic warfare, including by building institutional expertise, developing training programs, and even offering academic courses devoted to the subject, if it wants to sustain its advantage. (This advice would be well-heeded even for middle powers that find themselves in influential blocs like the G7 and seek to wield economic power through sanctions.)
Interestingly, Fishman looks to the future of sanctions and export controls, suggesting that they could be applied to global challenges such as climate change or AI governance, given the US’s leverage over finance and advanced technologies. While this suggestion feels divorced from our current reality (where we are all trying to survive the transition of the US into a belligerent and unpredictable autocracy), as we settle into our new reality, it is good advice for those looking to do more than just survive, but also shape the future of humanity.
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Fishman frames an “impossible trinity” of economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition: only two can coexist, and the likely outcome is a fragmented global economy where great power rivalry persists, with the risk that, in the absence of viable economic tools, conflict could return to the battlefield.
While the book, written before Trump’s return to office, does not account for Trump’s application of sanctions and tariffs against allies, international institutions, and even ICC judges, and how this risks accelerating the decline of US economic power. However, it is prescient in that Fishman rightly points out that measures that instrumentalize the dollar for overtly political ends might undermine the dollar’s role as the reserve currency. He also notes that China’s efforts to promote alternatives, such as the digital renminbi, have so far struggled to gain traction (for now).
Methods: This book differs from our usual Research Reads in that it’s a popular book, rather than an academic one. It traces the historical evolution of economic warfare through the lens of the US and its allies.
Who Should Read this book
This is a well-written, engaging history of US economic warfare. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the future of conflict and how economics and finance shape the battlefield.
Other references: This book should be read in conjunction with Daniel W. Drezner et al., eds., The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence (Brookings Institution Press, 2021).
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