The Weaponization of Plumbing
On December 5, 2022, a maritime traffic jam materialized at the mouth of the Bosphorus. Colossal oil tankers idled in the freezing waters between Europe and Asia, their massive hulls resting low in the sea. They were not stopped by a hostile gunboat, a sudden winter storm, or a mechanical failure. They were paralyzed by a few paragraphs of regulatory text published on a government website five thousand miles away in Washington, D.C. The United States and its European allies had just enacted a price cap on Russian oil. The policy threatened to withhold the maritime insurance that London firms monopolized unless the cargo was sold below sixty dollars a barrel. Turkish port authorities, terrified of letting uninsured vessels navigate their narrow straits and risk a catastrophic spill, simply halted the traffic.
Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare is about what happens when the plumbing of global commerce turns out to have a master valve. The United States controls the dollar, the clearinghouses, the semiconductor toolchain — and has learned to shut them off. Fishman’s argument is that this coercive power now threatens to destroy the very infrastructure it depends on.
I spent the early 2010s working in economic policy research, sitting in brightly lit conference rooms where we modeled global trade flows and supply chain efficiencies. We treated capital as a fluid that naturally sought the path of least resistance. The political borders on our maps were quaint historical artifacts, increasingly irrelevant to the serious business of global integration. We were entirely wrong. We thought we were building a frictionless global marketplace. We were actually wiring an explosive charge into the foundation of the international system, handing the detonator to a small group of lawyers at the U.S. Treasury Department.
Fishman was one of those people holding the detonator. A former State Department official who helped design the sanctions regime against Russia following its 2014 annexation of Crimea, he writes from the inside. He understands the plumbing. And he understands that power today resides not just in aircraft carriers, but in the mundane, bureaucratic nodes where global commerce is forced to narrow.
From Blockades to Spreadsheets
For most of human history, economic warfare was a blunt, physical endeavor. Fishman opens his account with Pericles and the Megarian Decree in 432 BC, an Athenian embargo designed to starve a Spartan ally into submission. It failed, accelerating the descent into the Peloponnesian War. Napoleon’s Continental System collapsed because France lacked the naval supremacy to enforce it. Woodrow Wilson dreamed of an “economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy” that would make military force obsolete, baking the concept into the League of Nations. It failed spectacularly when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. The League cobbled together a halfhearted embargo that exempted oil and coal. Mussolini ignored it, conquered Addis Ababa, and the League folded.
Even in the modern era, the United Nations embargo against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1990s required a massive, continuous deployment of warships to board and inspect cargo vessels. It was expensive, exhausting, and highly porous, leaking billions of dollars through illicit smuggling routes while the civilian population starved. Economic warfare historically required a physical blockade. You needed ships to stop trade.
What changed was the architecture of international finance. In the aftermath of the Cold War, a coalition of neoliberal policymakers and Wall Street executives built a highly centralized electronic infrastructure to move money across borders. The U.S. dollar became the undisputed reserve currency, bolstered by the 1970s petrodollar recycling agreements negotiated with Saudi Arabia. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), based in Belgium, became the messaging system for global payments. The Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) in New York settled the transactions.
The architects of this system, men like former Citibank CEO Walter Wriston, believed they were building a network that would transcend the nation-state. They inadvertently built a trap.
The realization that this infrastructure could be weaponized arrived in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The Bush administration tasked a small group of Treasury Department officials, led by Stuart Levey and Juan Zarate, with tracking and freezing terrorist financing. They quickly discovered that global banks were terrified of regulatory risk. If the U.S. government threatened to cut a foreign bank off from the dollar, that bank would immediately sever ties with whoever Washington deemed toxic.
Fishman isolates a 2005 campaign against North Korea as the proof of concept. Pyongyang was allegedly counterfeiting American currency and laundering the proceeds through Banco Delta Asia, a tiny bank in Macau. The Treasury Department designated the bank a “primary money laundering concern” under Section 311 of the Patriot Act. The effect was instantaneous. Global financial institutions, fearing contagion, severed ties not just with the Macau bank, but with North Korea entirely. The Macau authorities froze the funds. North Korea was financially suffocated. The United States had discovered a way to project power globally without moving a single ship. The era of the spreadsheet blockade had begun.
The Iranian Blueprint
The weapon worked because of the dollar’s indispensability. But as Fishman maps the progression of U.S. economic warfare, the tactics evolve from targeted strikes to systemic quarantines. Against Iran, the Obama administration deployed what became known as “secondary sanctions.”
This was a brutal ultimatum to the world. You can do business with Tehran, or you can do business with Wall Street, but you cannot do both.
Fishman details how Levey and his successor, David Cohen, embarked on a global roadshow. They sat down with the CEOs of major European and Asian banks, laying out declassified intelligence showing how Iranian shell companies used deceptive practices to fund their nuclear program. The implicit threat was clear. If your bank processes these transactions, you will lose your correspondent accounts in New York. You will lose access to the dollar. The $80 million fine levied against the Dutch bank ABN AMRO and the staggering $1.9 billion penalty against HSBC proved Washington was not bluffing.
Foreign companies abandoned Iranian oil fields and construction projects overnight. The French energy giant Total withdrew. European banks closed accounts. The U.S. Congress, impatient with the pace of the economic squeeze, forced the Obama administration to go further, passing legislation that targeted the Central Bank of Iran.
Here, Fishman reveals the sheer creativity of the sanctions technocrats. Recognizing that a total embargo on Iranian oil would spike global energy prices and hurt Western consumers, Treasury officials devised a scheme to trap Iran’s revenues. Foreign refineries could continue buying Iranian crude, but they had to deposit the payments into restricted escrow accounts in their home countries. Tehran could use those funds to buy local goods — Chinese refrigerators or Indian agricultural products — but it could not repatriate the hard currency.
Iran was allowed to sell its most valuable asset, but it was denied the wealth. The resulting economic crisis forced the Iranian leadership to the negotiating table, culminating in the 2015 nuclear deal. The United States had achieved a major geopolitical objective entirely through financial asphyxiation.
When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Washington faced a different beast. Russia was the world’s eighth-largest economy, deeply enmeshed with European energy markets. A full financial blockade would trigger a global recession. So the Treasury Department invented “sectoral sanctions.” They barred specific Russian state-owned banks and energy giants from raising new debt on Western capital markets. It was designed to starve the Russian economy of future growth without disrupting current operations. The scalpel replaced the machete.
The Silicon Choke
Semiconductors are where the story turns from finance to physics. Fishman’s account of the campaign against China shows how Washington discovered that intellectual property could be weaponized just as effectively as the dollar — maybe more so, because you can’t counterfeit a lithography machine.
For decades, Washington watched as Beijing subsidized its state champions, forced technology transfers, and engaged in rampant industrial espionage. The assumption was that bringing China into the World Trade Organization would eventually liberalize its political system. When that fantasy evaporated, the Trump administration began looking for a way to halt China’s ascent to technological supremacy.
They found it in the Foreign Direct Product Rule. The FDPR is an obscure regulatory mechanism that allows the U.S. government to control the export of any item produced globally if it relies on American technology.
The initial target was ZTE, a Chinese telecom giant caught violating sanctions on Iran. When Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross issued a denial order cutting ZTE off from American components, the company effectively shut down within a month. It was a terrifying display of leverage. Trump eventually reversed the penalty as a personal favor to Xi Jinping, but the national security apparatus had seen the kill switch in action.
They soon turned it on Huawei. The Chinese company was poised to dominate the global rollout of 5G telecommunications networks. The U.S. government viewed this as an unacceptable security threat, fearing Beijing could use Huawei equipment to intercept communications or disable critical infrastructure. When diplomatic pressure failed to convince allies like the United Kingdom to ban Huawei, Washington deployed the FDPR.
The Commerce Department ruled that no semiconductor foundry in the world could sell advanced chips to Huawei if those chips were manufactured using American software or machine tools. Since virtually all advanced chipmaking relies on U.S. technology — companies like Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA dominate the machine tool market — the ban was absolute. The Taiwanese giant TSMC, which manufactured Huawei’s in-house chip designs, severed ties.
Huawei’s smartphone business collapsed. Its 5G rollout stalled. The United States had located the physical bottleneck of the digital age.
The Biden administration adopted and expanded this architecture, issuing sweeping export controls in October 2022 designed to cut China off from the advanced semiconductors required for artificial intelligence and military modernization. The leap from freezing bank accounts to throttling a country’s entire technological future — that’s a different kind of war, even if no one in Washington uses the word.
The Illusion of the Scalpel
Fishman writes from inside the machine, and it shows — both in the precision of his technical knowledge and in certain blind spots that come with institutional loyalty. He believes in these weapons. His worry is calibration, not legitimacy.
But look at the actual outcomes. Did maximum pressure break the regime in Tehran? Iran is now closer to a nuclear weapon than ever. Did export controls permanently cripple Huawei? The company recently released the Mate 60 Pro, powered by a domestically manufactured seven-nanometer chip that U.S. restrictions were supposed to make impossible.
And then there is Russia. Fishman devotes a significant portion of the book to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He details the frantic diplomacy led by Daleep Singh, the Biden administration’s deputy national security advisor for international economics, to coordinate the freezing of over $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves. It was an unprecedented financial strike.
Fishman suggests that the failure to deter Vladimir Putin was partly a failure of communication. If the G7 had explicitly threatened the central bank reserves months earlier, he argues, Putin might have recalculated the costs of his invasion and backed down.
I find this assumption fundamentally flawed. It projects a Western, technocratic rationality onto a revanchist autocrat. Fishman assumes that Putin weighs foreign exchange reserves against historic destiny and chooses the reserves. I grant that the scale of the financial freeze shocked Elvira Nabiullina, the head of Russia’s central bank, and the rest of the Moscow economic elite. They did not see it coming. But the technocrats do not run Russia. Putin’s imperial calculus was never going to be altered by a spreadsheet of immobilized euros. You cannot deter a messianic land grab by threatening a country’s correspondent banking accounts.
This blind spot reveals the limits of the American sanctions doctrine. Washington policymakers consistently overestimate the psychological weight of economic pain on regimes that view their survival in existential, civilizational terms.
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s Underground Empire maps the same territory but treats the weaponization of global networks as a structural hazard that traps both sides — the coercer locked into escalation, the coerced into building alternatives. They coined “weaponized interdependence.” Agathe Demarais, in Backfire, goes further, arguing the relentless use of sanctions is actively accelerating the decline of American hegemony by forcing adversaries to construct parallel financial systems. Fishman is more sanguine than either. He acknowledges the risks of overcompliance and the fraying of the dollar’s supremacy, but ultimately views economic warfare as a necessary, manageable evolution of American power. His prescription is to institutionalize the practice — a permanent economic war council within the U.S. government to plan and execute these campaigns.
It is the ultimate technocrat’s answer to a historical rupture: create an interagency committee.
The Impossible Trinity
Fishman frames what he calls an “impossible trinity.” In the current geopolitical environment, a nation can possess economic interdependence, economic security, or geopolitical competition. It can only choose two.
During the unipolar moment of the 1990s, the United States chose interdependence and security, because there was no competition. Today, with the return of great power rivalry, the pursuit of security requires unwinding interdependence.
We are watching this unraveling in real time. The Global South is increasingly wary of a system where their sovereign wealth can be erased by a stroke of the U.S. president’s pen. The BRICS coalition has expanded, driven largely by a shared desire to insulate themselves from Western economic coercion. India continues to buy Russian oil in massive quantities, settling trades in alternative currencies.
Fishman’s account of the G7 oil price cap perfectly illustrates the tension between the financial world and the physical world. The policy was an attempt to defy the laws of supply and demand by creating a buyers’ cartel. The West would allow Russian oil to flow, preventing a global price spike, but only if it was sold at a steep discount, starving Putin’s war machine.
It was an elegant theory. For a while, it worked. But the physical world resists financial engineering. Russia simply bought up hundreds of aging tankers, creating a shadow fleet that sails without Western insurance or logistics, moving millions of barrels of crude outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. Treasury. The chokepoint was bypassed. Those tankers idling at the Bosphorus in December 2022 turned out to be a transitional image — not the permanent condition Washington had planned for, but a problem Russia solved by buying its way around the rules with rust-bucket freighters and opaque shell companies.
Fishman explains the mechanics of this new warfare with absolute clarity. He demystifies the acronyms and the regulatory maneuvers, showing exactly how a desk officer in Washington can trigger a bank run in Moscow or halt an assembly line in Shenzhen. As a guide to the infrastructure of American economic coercion, Chokepoints has no rival.
But the book cannot escape what it documents. Economic warfare relies on the networks of globalization to function. The act of waging that war destroys the trust required to maintain those networks.
You can freeze a rival’s dollar reserves. You can embargo their access to extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. You can force the world to choose sides. But you cannot force the world to remain static while you do it. The targets adapt. They hoard gold. They build domestic chip foundries. They trade in renminbi.
The era of frictionless global commerce is dead. We killed it because we found a use for its corpse. Fishman has written the definitive autopsy report, even if he still believes the patient can be revived to fight another day. The image that lingers long after the final chapter is not the triumphant American lawyer drafting a new sanction. It is the Russian central banker, wearing her signature brooches, quietly deploying capital controls to shield her autocrat’s war from the very financial system the West built to ensure peace.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com