Chokepoints

Fishman worked on sanctions policy at the State Department and in the Treasury, and wrote this history of how the United States built economic warfare into its principal instrument of coercion.

The historical narrative covers the development of the modern sanctions toolkit. After 2001 the Treasury developed methods for cutting entities off from the dollar clearing system, which works because dollar transactions ultimately clear through American institutions, giving the United States jurisdiction over transactions between foreign parties. The Iran programme built on this, using secondary sanctions that penalise foreign firms for dealing with sanctioned parties, which forced banks and companies worldwide to comply with American policy regardless of their own governments' positions. Fishman covers the Russia programmes after 2014 and after 2022, including the freezing of central bank reserves, which was the most consequential single action because it demonstrated that reserves held in Western currencies are not unconditionally available. He also covers export controls on semiconductors and on the equipment used to make them, which he treats as the more powerful instrument against China because the chokepoints in that supply chain are narrow and held by American and allied firms.

His analytical argument concerns durability. Each use of these instruments demonstrates their power and simultaneously gives every other country a reason to reduce its exposure. He examines the alternatives being built, including payment systems outside the dollar, central bank reserve diversification, and Chinese semiconductor investment, and argues that the instruments' effectiveness will decline as those alternatives mature.

The book is written by a former practitioner with access to participants and covers events through the current period. Its judgement about how quickly alternatives will develop is a forecast rather than a finding, and the evidence on de-dollarisation to date is mixed.