Economic warfare: The weapon of sanctions against Iran, Russia, and Huawei

In geopolitics, the term "chokepoint" (bottleneck, narrow passage) is used to refer to critical locations in global flows, primarily transport and trade, especially maritime, such as the Straits of Malacca, Hormuz, and Gibraltar, or the Suez and Panama Canals. In geoeconomics, which can be seen as discipline or as part of geopolitics if the latter is conceived in a broad sense, chokepoints are bottlenecks in financial or technological flows rather than physical ones: as most transactions are carried out in dollars and monetary transfers use the Swift exchange system, whoever controls that currency (the United States) or has power over the entity that manages telematic banking connections (the United States in cooperation with its major Western partners) has the final say over these processes.

International economic sanctions have sometimes been described as "coercive diplomacy," but Edward Fishman places them squarely in the realm of warfare, namely economic warfare. Although there have always been tensions and inter-state conflicts with an economic dimension, the widespread resource sanctions in this subject the last two decades is linked to two fundamental factors: profound globalization, which connects production centers and markets around the world, and a desire on the part of the United States, after the war fatigue of Afghanistan and Iraq, to seek other means to subdue rival or unruly countries.

Fishman is an expert on the subject, having worked in the department , the Pentagon, and the US Treasury, where he was part of the teams responsible design Iran's nuclear program and Russia's occupation of Ukrainian territory. Fishman's work is a detailed account of the steps taken by Washington to progressively refine a tool result ambivalent: it served to get the Ayatollah regime to agree in 2015 to shelve, at least temporarily, its nuclear program (although sanctions returned when Trump broke the agreement by Obama), but it did not prevent Russia from attacking Ukraine again in 2022 despite the sanctions it received for taking Crimea in 2014. Coercive measures have made it possible to curb the growth of the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE, accused by the US of sharing technology with Iran and North Korea, but it remains to be seen how the standoff with Huawei will end, as the US has managed to ban it from national 5G networks and has imposed restrictions on its access to semiconductors.

Fishman believes that "the US economic arsenal has proven that it can inflict tremendous damage, but it has not proven that it can reliably advance US strategic objectives." For sanctions to be effective, he warns, they "often require the cooperation of other states, a difficult task, especially when they are asked to make sacrifices." Such cooperation, especially with Europe and the G7 as a whole, was sought by Obama and Biden, but Trump has scorned it.

Not only has Washington been abandoning the convenience of multilateralism, but the goal sanctions has also shifted from forcing the offender to change its attitude to simply making it pay a price. This is the case with the technological sanctions imposed on Chinese companies, which were actually proposed by the US to prevent Beijing from overtaking it as a power, rather than to achieve the chimerical goal of ensuring that these companies guarantee their independence from the Communist Party. In the case of Russia, this is the only resource the international community has left: to weaken Moscow economically, knowing that this pressure will not motivate it to withdraw from Ukraine.

The book details how the recruitment of experts in economic sanctions began and how the size of that unit grew, first in the Treasury and then also commanded from the department or the National committee , depending on the organization of each presidency. It emerged just after 9/11 as a result of George Bush's desire to trace the financing of terrorist groups and came of age with the sanctions on Iran that led to agreement and succeeded in paralyzing its oil trade and international banking transactions. Replicating this for Russia was more complex, given the size of its Economics its greater global interaction. In addition, in preparation for his 2022 invasion, Putin had preemptively accumulated foreign exchange reserves and created a parallel system of bank transfers. China has an Economics larger and more globalized Economics , and aside from the tariff war waged by Washington to reduce its trade deficit, the United States is taking advantage of another of the chokepoints it dominates—being at the forefront of microchips—to try to slow the advance of Chinese technology.

The work does not question the supremacy that Wall Street and Silicon Valley have given the United States in the world, nor Washington's legitimacy in using it to wage these economic wars. It sees them as justified in the case of combating Iran's nuclear program and curbing Russian aggression in Ukraine, and seems to agree with the US's efforts to maintain technological primacy over China, understanding that this is an skill due to Chinese statism. He hints at unease, however, about the lack of unity in the criteria of the various US administrations, especially Trump's sympathies towards Putin and some of his snubs to US allies.

Precisely to provide some continuity, Fishman proposes the creation of a "committee economic warfarecommittee " in Washington to plan which measures may be most effective in the future. He believes that the dollar will continue to give the US a privileged position in the international community for some time, but warns that the 'Age of Economic Warfare' will not last forever for the US: new industries may emerge in which it can gain an advantage and use as leverage, but other powers will also find ways to untie the knot.