Chokepoints. By Edward Fishman. Portfolio; 560 pages; $40. Elliott & Thompson; £25
In the opening episode of “Jack Ryan”, a TV series based on Tom Clancy’s novels, the show’s square-jawed hero charms an impressionable young Treasury official into blocking the bank account of a suspected terrorist. “That…was awesome,” she sighs, after pushing the button. “I get so frustrated when people say Treasury doesn’t do anything,” remarks Mr Ryan, a CIA analyst and former Marine, before jetting off to a firefight in Yemen.
People do not say that now. In “Chokepoints”, Edward Fishman, a former official at both the Department of State and the Department of the Treasury, describes how the American government’s unglamorous economic arms have jumped into the middle of the country’s geopolitical fights over the past two decades. This happened as leaders lost faith in military force but gained confidence in the many economic weapons at their disposal. Some of these “chokepoints” are obvious, like the dollar and vital American chip technologies. Others, such as Western domination of shipping insurance, are more obscure.
The author takes readers on a global tour. He writes about how American officials persuaded foreign banks and energy companies to shun Iran, forcing it to negotiate a nuclear deal in 2015; how Western allies stopped big Russian firms from raising new money in global financial markets after the country’s annexation of Crimea in 2014; and how the Department of Commerce banned countries from supplying China with advanced semiconductors made with American technology.
The book has no Jack Ryans. But it contains a satisfying amount of dash and drama. The cast includes Stuart Levey, described as “a founding father of American financial warfare”, who persuaded foreign banks to abandon Iran. (They did so not because their governments required it, but because it was against their commercial interest to serve a country with controversial nuclear ambitions and crummy banking habits.) Another character, Daleep Singh, a former Goldman Sachs trader, was once described as “The Economist personified”. He led the charge to freeze Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves in 2022. A third character is David Cohen. Called a “financial Batman” by colleagues, he crossed from Treasury to the CIA. (He also appeared as an extra in “Game of Thrones”, a TV show co-created by his brother-in-law.)
Mr Fishman’s various stints working in government on sanctions qualify him on the substance. The style might owe more to his time as an editor at Foreign Affairs and to his favourite professor while a student at Yale: Donald Kagan, a historian of ancient Greece. The book shares Kagan’s commitment to chronology, without allowing hindsight to contaminate the storytelling. That approach helps him show how economic weapons evolved through trial, error and political pressure. It also makes for a cracking yarn.
When Mr Levey went to work at the Treasury in 2004, sanctions were out of favour. “That’s what I like: really low expectations,” he said. When he wanted to brief Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, on his ideas to thwart Iran, he had to follow her around the Middle East before he could get an hour to talk to her on her flight home. Success against Iran encouraged American officials to use financial weapons against Russia when it annexed Crimea. But the Europeans might never have gone along had Russian proxies not shot down a passenger jet carrying 196 Dutch nationals in July 2014.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Mr Singh quickly persuaded frightened Europeans to freeze the Russian central bank’s reserves. But he could not convince his own Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, herself a former central banker. Counterparts reached Mario Draghi, Italy’s prime minister and former head of the European Central Bank, who was able to reassure Ms Yellen—one central banker to another. The world economy, shaped by vast impersonal forces, is sometimes shaped by personal forces, too.
In the book’s final, more analytical chapters, Mr Fishman points out that Western officials were often overly afraid of their own weapons. They worried about “catastrophic success”—inflicting so much damage on their adversaries it would hurt their own economies. He argues that the post-war world has wrestled with an awkward “trilemma”: economic security, economic interdependence and geopolitical rivalry. They cannot all coexist; the world must sacrifice one of the three.
Today countries are feeling vulnerable, especially so since Donald Trump’s return to power. What sets the president apart is his passion for waging economic war on America’s longtime allies, which he combines with a fondness for tariffs. This absorbing book, which concludes before Mr Trump’s return, describes how ingenious technocrats forged new, more precise tools of economic coercion, including what one calls a “scalpel”. Mr Trump, however, often prefers the cudgel. ■
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