New book “Chokepoints” analyzes modern U.S. economic warfare

America imposes thrice as many financial sanctions as another nation on this planet, based on an analysis by The Washington Submit. And whereas President Donald Trump has said he’d like to make use of sanctions “as little as doable,” these financial weapons will proceed to be an important a part of how this nation conducts foreign policy and protects its nationwide safety pursuits.

In his new ebook, “Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare,” Edward Fishman, a former state division official and present adjunct professor and analysis scholar at Columbia College, chronicles how the USA has managed conflicts overseas by means of sanctions and different financial coverage instruments. The next is an excerpt from Fishman’s new ebook which comes out Feb. 25, 2025.

INTRODUCTION

Win With out Preventing

There are locations on this planet that, owing to geography alone, seem repeatedly throughout the pages of historical past. The Bosphorus, the slender waterway that cuts by way of the middle of Istanbul and marks the boundary between Europe and Asia, is one such place. It’s the passageway from the resource-rich Black Sea to the ports of the Mediterranean and the oceans past. It’s a very important crossroads, a spot the place civilizations commerce and jostle for energy, the place empires rise and fall.

In its golden age within the fifth century BC, Athens, the main city-state of historic Greece, trusted free navigation of the Bosphorus for entry to meals. Ships loaded grain from the fertile fields of Ukraine and dried fish from Crimea and sailed south by way of the Bosphorus towards Athens, protected on their journey by a string of imperial outposts and the fearsome Athenian navy. This truth was not misplaced on Athens’s greatest rival, Sparta. The twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian Warfare got here to an finish when the Spartan navy destroyed the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami and seized management of the Bosphorus, severing Athens’s meals provide and ravenous it into submission. The Bosphorus had been the Athenians’ lifeline, and the Bosphorus was the place their empire met its demise.

Seven centuries later, on the banks of the identical strait, the Roman emperor Constantine based the town of Constantinople, recognized immediately as Istanbul. Constantinople grew into Europe’s largest and wealthiest metropolis, its skyline punctuated by the Hagia Sophia’s majestic dome. It served because the capital of the japanese department of the Roman Empire for greater than a thousand years till coming beneath Ottoman assault within the fifteenth century. protracted siege, Constantinople fell, extinguishing the final embers of the Roman Empire. From its new capital on the Bosphorus, the Ottoman Empire flourished for hundreds of years to return. The Ottomans, like their predecessors, fought arduous to fend off different nice powers that coveted the strait, from the Crimean Warfare to World Warfare I.

That historical past has so usually been made on this one spot isn’t any accident. The Bosphorus is the epitome of a chokepoint: a gateway so important to worldwide commerce that controlling it confers immense energy—and blocking it could possibly convey an enemy to its knees.

On December 5, 2022, with Russia’s brutal warfare in opposition to Ukraine raging a number of hundred miles away, an ominous scene unfolded on the mouth of the Bosphorus. So far as the attention might see, a line of colossal oil tankers, some practically a thousand ft lengthy, fashioned a maritime visitors jam. Their transit by way of the strait was blocked. Information of the standstill unfold rapidly. The Bosphorus is likely one of the busiest delivery lanes on this planet immediately and an important artery for the power and meals commerce. Closing it for any extended interval would unleash chaos on the worldwide financial system.

What was responsible for this gridlock?

It was not a hostile gunboat or battleship. Nor was it a delivery accident— an ever-present threat within the Bosphorus, whose sharp bends and fierce currents make it one of many world’s hardest waterways to navigate. Gumming up the works on that December day have been new laws, issued by the USA and its closest allies, which had gone into impact at 12:01 a.m. that morning.

Underneath the laws, U.S. and European companies might now not ship, insure, or finance cargoes of Russian oil bought for any worth above $60 per barrel. The coverage, generally known as the “worth cap,” was supposed to chop the Kremlin’s oil revenues and thereby undermine its warfare effort in Ukraine. The worth cap packed a punch as a result of buying and selling oil with out utilizing Western companies and establishments was subsequent to unimaginable. A typical barrel of Russian oil was shipped aboard a European tanker whose insurance coverage was British and whose cargo was paid for in U.S. {dollars}. The West had a near-monopoly on maritime insurance coverage, specifically: its insurers lined greater than 95 % of all oil cargoes. Now, Western governments have been exploiting this dominance to stem the circulation of petrodollars to the Kremlin.

Turkey didn’t formally assist the value cap, however the Turkish officers monitoring visitors by way of the Bosphorus have been conscious about its implications: if a tanker was in violation of the coverage, it will possible lose its insurance coverage protection, leaving the Turkish authorities susceptible within the occasion of an oil spill or another catastrophic accident. In consequence, skittish Turkish officers have been demanding further proof that every tanker was absolutely insured earlier than it might transit the strait, a requirement that led to the mounting congestion. Just a few paragraphs of regulatory jargon, revealed on the web site of the U.S. Treasury Division in Washington, had floor visitors to a halt at a significant waterway greater than 5 thousand miles away.

It was the newest in a collection of strikes by Western governments to squeeze the Russian financial system within the wake of Vladimir Putin’s grisly invasion of Ukraine. Each financial penalty levied in opposition to Russia on this stress marketing campaign was like the value cap: easy laws, issued on the stroke of a pen by little-known American and European bureaucrats. However their results rippled far and extensive. The measures reshaped commerce and monetary flows, rewiring the worldwide financial system. They restructured relationships between world powers, sketching the blueprints of a brand new worldwide order.

The financial offensive in opposition to Russia is a part of a rare evolution in U.S. overseas coverage. To handle probably the most urgent international safety challenges, the USA has come to depend on an arsenal of financial weapons, chief amongst them sanctions, over the usage of army power. Financial weapons have existed for hundreds of years, however previously twenty years, their sophistication and affect have grown by leaps and bounds. In a world financial system interconnected by half a century of globalization and neoliberal reforms, the actions of U.S. officers can ship shock waves throughout the globe at breathtaking pace.

That is financial warfare. It’s how America fights its most necessary geopolitical battles immediately. From thwarting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons to checking Russian imperialism and China’s bid for world mastery, the USA has reached into its financial arsenal to get the job completed.

Within the course of, the world financial system has turn into a battlefield. Its weapons take the type of sanctions, export controls, and funding restrictions. Its commanders will not be generals and admirals however legal professionals, diplomats, and economists. Its foot troopers will not be courageous women and men who volunteer for army service however enterprise executives who search to maximise income but usually discover they haven’t any choice apart from to obey Washington’s marching orders. And America’s power in these battles stems not from its gargantuan protection price range however from its primacy in worldwide finance and expertise.

It is a new type of warfare. However financial warfare itself is as previous as historical past. In 1958, Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize–successful economist and nuclear strategist, outlined financial warfare as “financial means by which harm is imposed on different nations or the specter of harm used to convey stress on them.” As Schelling identified, the excellence between financial and traditional warfare is how every is waged: Sanctioning an adversary’s financial institution is an act of financial warfare, whereas bombing that very same financial institution is an act of standard warfare. Each could intention to close the financial institution down, however they search to perform this objective in very alternative ways. Herein lies the primary purpose policymakers are so tempted by financial warfare: its techniques are inherently nonviolent. What makes immediately’s financial wars novel is the extremely interdependent world financial system, which amplifies their affect and makes their aftershocks arduous to include.

From Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, by Edward Fishman. Reprinted by permission of Portfolio, an imprint of The Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random Home LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Edward Fishman.