The West has relied on sanctions to exert geopolitical pressure in recent decades, but at what cost to the globalized economy?
Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints: How Economic Warfare Is Changing the World is a clear and authoritative account of how sanctions have evolved into central tools of geopolitical competition. Drawing on his experience inside the US government, Fishman shows how control over financial systems, technology and global trade infrastructure has become a form of strategic leverage as consequential as military power.
At its best, the book works as both history and operating manual. Fishman traces sanctions back to the League of Nations, where they were conceived as a rules-based alternative to war. In practice, they proved slow, leaky and socially regressive – hitting the vulnerable while elites adapted. That early failure explains why sanctions fell out of favor, and why their recent resurgence reflects not continuity but reinvention.
That reinvention is the book’s central insight. After costly and inconclusive military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, US policymakers turned to a different question: how to impose maximum pressure at minimal domestic cost. The answer was to weaponize “chokepoints” – the structural dependencies of globalization itself. Dollar clearing systems, insurance markets, semiconductors and intellectual property law all became levers of coercion. Crucially, enforcement shifted from governments to markets: banks and corporations, facing existential legal risk, became the de facto executors of foreign policy.
Fishman is strong on how this system works. His explanation of the intersection between legal jurisdiction, financial plumbing and corporate risk management is clear and highly relevant for any business leader charged with navigating heightened geopolitical risk in a world where geopolitical strategy is embedded in compliance functions, capital allocation and supply chain design.
The book’s implicit thesis, however, deserves more robust interrogation. Fishman largely frames economic warfare as a necessary response to rule-breaking states. That framing is incomplete. The US did not simply discover these tools – it built and scaled them. From a non-US perspective, the weaponization of global systems may look less like the enforcement of norms, and more like the assertion of structural advantage. That distinction matters, particularly in understanding why rivals are investing heavily in alternative financial and technological ecosystems.
A second tension runs through the book: what begins as targeted intervention often comes to resemble permanent economic confrontation. Sanctions aimed at discrete objectives – curbing Iran’s nuclear program or Russia’s territorial ambitions, say – expand into broader strategies of containment, most notably with China. Fishman acknowledges this shift, but stops short of questioning its end state. If economic warfare becomes continuous, what does success look like?
There are also structural blind spots. The ratchet effect, whereby administrations escalate rather than unwind sanctions, is well observed, but the exit problem is underdeveloped. The Iran nuclear deal illustrates the point: sanctions may lead to negotiation but not necessarily to durable resolution.
For business, the most material issue is risk transmission. As sanctions deepen, they cease to be targeted tools and become system-wide shocks. Energy markets, supply chains and capital flows all become exposed. Fishman acknowledges this “blowback” but underplays its strategic significance. The more these tools are used, the more they incentivize decoupling – whether through parallel payment systems, regional supply chains or technology bifurcation.
The reality is that economic warfare is not costless. It may reduce reliance on military force, but it accelerates the fragmentation of the global economic order on which Western prosperity has depended.
Piers Cain is a management consultant
Chokepoints: How Economic Warfare Is Changing the World
Edward Fishman (Elliott & Thompson)
