The United States imposes three times as many economic sanctions as any other country in the world, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. And while President Donald Trump has said he’d like to use sanctions “as little as possible,” these economic weapons will continue to be an essential part of how this country conducts foreign policy and protects its national security interests.
In his new book, “Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare,” Edward Fishman, a former state department official and current adjunct professor and research scholar at Columbia University, chronicles how the United States has managed conflicts abroad by way of sanctions and other economic policy tools. The following is an excerpt from Fishman’s new book which comes out Feb. 25, 2025.
INTRODUCTION
Win Without Fighting
There are places in the world that, owing to geography alone, appear repeatedly across the pages of history. The Bosphorus, the narrow waterway that cuts through the center of Istanbul and marks the boundary between Europe and Asia, is one such place. It is the passageway from the resource-rich Black Sea to the ports of the Mediterranean and the oceans beyond. It is a vital crossroads, a place where civilizations trade and jostle for power, where empires rise and fall.
In its golden age in the fifth century BC, Athens, the leading city-state of ancient Greece, depended on free navigation of the Bosphorus for access to food. Ships loaded grain from the fertile fields of Ukraine and dried fish from Crimea and sailed south through the Bosphorus toward Athens, protected on their journey by a string of imperial outposts and the fearsome Athenian navy. This fact was not lost on Athens’s biggest rival, Sparta. The twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War came to an end when the Spartan navy destroyed the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami and seized control of the Bosphorus, severing Athens’s food supply and starving it into submission. The Bosphorus had been the Athenians’ lifeline, and the Bosphorus was where their empire met its demise.
Seven centuries later, on the banks of the same strait, the Roman emperor Constantine founded the city of Constantinople, known today as Istanbul. Constantinople grew into Europe’s largest and wealthiest metropolis, its skyline punctuated by the Hagia Sophia’s majestic dome. It served as the capital of the eastern branch of the Roman Empire for more than a thousand years until coming under Ottoman attack in the fifteenth century. protracted siege, Constantinople fell, extinguishing the last embers of the Roman Empire. From its new capital on the Bosphorus, the Ottoman Empire flourished for centuries to come. The Ottomans, like their predecessors, fought hard to fend off other great powers that coveted the strait, from the Crimean War to World War I.
That history has so often been made in this one spot is no accident. The Bosphorus is the epitome of a chokepoint: a gateway so critical to international trade that controlling it confers immense power—and blocking it can bring an enemy to its knees.
On December 5, 2022, with Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine raging a few hundred miles away, an ominous scene unfolded at the mouth of the Bosphorus. As far as the eye could see, a line of colossal oil tankers, some nearly a thousand feet long, formed a maritime traffic jam. Their transit through the strait was blocked. News of the standstill spread quickly. The Bosphorus is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world today and an essential artery for the energy and food trade. Closing it for any prolonged period would unleash chaos on the global economy.
What was causing this gridlock?
It was not a hostile gunboat or battleship. Nor was it a shipping accident— an ever-present risk in the Bosphorus, whose sharp bends and fierce currents make it one of the world’s hardest waterways to navigate. Gumming up the works on that December day were new regulations, issued by the United States and its closest allies, which had gone into effect at 12:01 a.m. that morning.
Under the regulations, U.S. and European firms could no longer ship, insure, or finance cargoes of Russian oil sold for any price above $60 per barrel. The policy, known as the “price cap,” was intended to cut the Kremlin’s oil revenues and thereby undermine its war effort in Ukraine. The price cap packed a punch because trading oil without using Western services and institutions was next to impossible. A typical barrel of Russian oil was shipped aboard a European tanker whose insurance was British and whose cargo was paid for in U.S. dollars. The West had a near-monopoly on maritime insurance, in particular: its insurers covered more than 95 percent of all oil cargoes. Now, Western governments were exploiting this dominance to stem the flow of petrodollars to the Kremlin.
Turkey did not formally support the price cap, but the Turkish officials monitoring traffic through the Bosphorus were acutely aware of its implications: if a tanker was in violation of the policy, it would likely lose its insurance coverage, leaving the Turkish government vulnerable in the event of an oil spill or any other catastrophic accident. As a result, skittish Turkish officials were demanding extra proof that each tanker was fully insured before it could transit the strait, a requirement that led to the mounting congestion. A few paragraphs of regulatory jargon, published on the website of the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, had ground traffic to a halt at a vital waterway more than five thousand miles away.
It was the latest in a series of moves by Western governments to squeeze the Russian economy in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s grisly invasion of Ukraine. Every economic penalty levied against Russia in this pressure campaign was like the price cap: simple regulations, issued at the stroke of a pen by little-known American and European bureaucrats. But their effects rippled far and wide. The measures reshaped trade and financial flows, rewiring the global economy. They restructured relationships between world powers, sketching the blueprints of a new international order.
The economic offensive against Russia is part of an extraordinary evolution in U.S. foreign policy. To address the most pressing global security challenges, the United States has come to rely on an arsenal of economic weapons, chief among them sanctions, over the use of military force. Economic weapons have existed for centuries, but in the past two decades, their sophistication and impact have grown by leaps and bounds. In a world economy interconnected by half a century of globalization and neoliberal reforms, the actions of U.S. officials can send shock waves across the globe at breathtaking speed.
This is economic warfare. It is how America fights its most important geopolitical battles today. From thwarting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons to checking Russian imperialism and China’s bid for world mastery, the United States has reached into its economic arsenal to get the job done.
In the process, the world economy has become a battlefield. Its weapons take the form of sanctions, export controls, and investment restrictions. Its commanders are not generals and admirals but lawyers, diplomats, and economists. Its foot soldiers are not brave men and women who volunteer for military service but business executives who seek to maximize profits yet often find they have no option other than to obey Washington’s marching orders. And America’s strength in these battles stems not from its gargantuan defense budget but from its primacy in international finance and technology.
This is a new kind of war. But economic warfare itself is as old as history. In 1958, Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and nuclear strategist, defined economic warfare as “economic means by which damage is imposed on other countries or the threat of damage used to bring pressure on them.” As Schelling pointed out, the distinction between economic and conventional war is how each is waged: Sanctioning an adversary’s bank is an act of economic war, whereas bombing that same bank is an act of conventional war. Both may aim to shut the bank down, but they seek to accomplish this goal in very different ways. Herein lies the main reason policymakers are so tempted by economic warfare: its tactics are inherently nonviolent. What makes today’s economic wars novel is the highly interdependent world economy, which amplifies their impact and makes their aftershocks hard to contain.
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 House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Edward Fishman.
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