CHOKEPOINTS:
AMERICAN POWER IN THE AGE OF ECONOMIC WARFARE
From
Amazon:
AN
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"Deftly
written, Chokepoints is a compelling and dramatic narrative
about the new shape of geopolitics."
—
Daniel Yergin, The Wall Street Journal
"A
timely, riveting world tour...[An] absorbing book."
—
The Economist
“Remarkable...One
of the most important books on economic warfare ever written.”
—
Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
The
epic story of how America turned the world economy into a weapon, upending
decades of globalization to take on a new authoritarian axis—Russia, China, and
Iran.
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.
In Chokepoints,
Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep
into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two
decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of
globalization and waged a new kind of economic war. 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,
exploiting America’s dominance in global finance and technology. Successive
U.S. presidents have relied on these unconventional weapons to address the most
pressing national-security threats, for good and for ill.
Chokepoints provides
a thrilling account of one of the most critical geopolitical developments of
our time, demystifying the complex strategies the U.S. government uses to
harness the power of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil against America’s
enemies. At the center of the narrative is an eclectic group of policy
innovators: the diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes who’ve masterminded
America’s escalating economic wars against Russia, China, and Iran.
Economic warfare has become the primary way the United States confronts international crises and counters rivals. Sometimes it has achieved spectacular success; other times, bitter failure. The result we live with today is a new world order: an economic arms race among great powers and a fracturing global economy. Chokepoints is the definitive account of how America pioneered this new, hard-hitting style of economic war—and how it’s changing the world.
