Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

Edward Fishman, Sr. Research Scholar, Center Global Energy Policy & Adj Professor, SIPA, Columbia University

Tuesday, March 4, 2025
12:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Webinar

ABOUT THE WEBINAR

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ABOUT THE BOOK

It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government.

Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare is the definitive account of how America has pioneered a new, hard-hitting style of economic warfare—and how it’s changing the world. In a shift from decades past, the United States now relies on economic warfare to confront global crises and counter rivals. The result is a new world order: an economic arms race among great powers and a fracturing global economy.

In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy. As Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei wreaked havoc on the world stage, mavericks within the U.S. government built a fearsome new arsenal of economic weapons—and successive U.S. presidents have relied on these weapons to address the most pressing national security threats, for good and for ill.

Chokepoints tells this thrilling story through the eyes of the mavericks themselves: the diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes who’ve masterminded America’s escalating economic wars against Russia, China, and Iran.

Fishman’s own career has given him a front-row seat to this new Age of Economic Warfare. As a former top State Department sanctions official, he played a central role in designing sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine and helped craft the economic pressure strategy that led to the Iran nuclear deal. He now teaches the flagship course on economic statecraft at Columbia University.

Fishman illuminates how control over economic chokepoints—such as the U.S. dollar, advanced semiconductor technology, and the services underpinning the global oil trade—has become the key to geopolitical power in the 21st century. While the United States holds the most critical chokepoints today, China and others are racing to close the gap. Chokepoints uncovers how we got here and how the contest to dominate these strategic nodes in the world economy will shape the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edward Fishman is a leading authority on economic statecraft and sanctions. He teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and is a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy. He also advises companies on geopolitical strategy and invests in early-stage technology startups. Previously, he served at the U.S. State Department as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, and at the U.S. Treasury Department as special assistant to the Under Secretary featured by outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Politico, and NPR. He holds a BA in History from Yale, an MPhil in International Relations from Cambridge, and an MBA from Stanford. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

Photo Credit: Daphne Youree

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Margaret Peters is Associate Director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Chair of the Global Studies major at UCLA. She is also a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research on the political economy of migration. She is currently working on a book project on how the process of forced displacement affects migrants’ sense of dignity and how these dignity concerns affect decisions of whether to move from the crisis zone, where to move, and when to return. She is additionally writing a book on how dictators use migration, including forced migration, to remain in power. Her award-winning book, Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization, argues that the increased ability of firms to produce anywhere in the world combined with growing international competition due to lowered trade barriers has led to greater limits on immigration, as businesses no longer see a need to support open immigration at home.