After Iran's nuclear capabilities advanced rapidly from 2006, the United States devoted itself to devising economic sanctions against Tehran. Washington had achieved a notable result in 2005 by freezing $25 million in North Korean assets held at Banco Delta Asia in Macau, but Iran was in an entirely different weight class. The country was a major oil exporter commercially connected to the entire world. The U.S. first passed an amendment in 2011 that allowed only countries gradually reducing their crude oil imports from Iran to continue purchasing Iranian oil. Then in 2012, Washington enacted legislation forcing Iran's oil sale proceeds to be deposited into conditional accounts at foreign banks. The measure aimed to prevent oil revenues from flowing back to the Iranian regime. Iran's oil sales subsequently dropped dramatically. Battered by economic hardship, Iran signed a nuclear agreement with the United States in 2015.
The new book "Chokepoints: How America Weaponized the World Economy" (published in Korean as "What Do Nations Fight With" by RH Korea, authored by Edward Fishman) vividly chronicles how the United States over the past 20 years has developed and deployed "economic weapons" — rather than missiles and bombs — to address security challenges. America's weapons in this "economic war" include sanctions, export controls, and investment restrictions. Their power derives from U.S. economic hegemony. The U.S. dollar is the foundational currency of international trade and finance, and global capital flows are virtually impossible without passing through America's major banking networks.
The author, Edward Fishman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Center for Geoeconomics, stood on the front lines of the economic wars waged by the United States. He served in the Policy Planning Staff of the Secretary of State during the Barack Obama administration and held positions as special adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Department of Defense and special assistant to the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
The book's original English title is "Chokepoints." A chokepoint refers to a vulnerable node where blocking a specific passage can paralyze an entire network. The Strait of Hormuz — which Iran has threatened to blockade as a bargaining chip following recent U.S. airstrikes — is a classic chokepoint. The author argues that the economic weapons developed by the United States allow it to seize chokepoints without shedding a single drop of blood. "With enhanced sanctions, the U.S. no longer needs to undertake costly and dangerous naval blockades. An American president can inflict economic punishment more severe than traditional blockades and embargoes with the stroke of a pen."
The author highlights the U.S. sanctions against Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a critical turning point in economic warfare. At the time, the United States and the West faced a dilemma over sanctions on Russian oil exports. Blocking Russia's oil exports would cause global oil prices to surge, delivering a shock to the West as well. Washington devised an ingenious solution: rather than reducing Russia's oil sales volume, it would cut the revenue Russia earned from those sales. The mechanism was a "price cap" that prohibited shipping and insurance coverage for Russian crude sold above $60 per barrel. The sanctions took effect immediately. A massive traffic jam of tankers stretching 300 meters long formed in the Bosporus Strait connecting the Mediterranean and Black seas. The congestion was caused by Turkish officials meticulously verifying whether each tanker complied with the price cap, fearing penalties for sanctions violations. In the first half of 2023, Russia's revenue from oil exports fell approximately 50% year-on-year.
The book points to the U.S. sanctions on Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei as an example of a new phase in economic warfare. Concluding that China's push for information technology supremacy could pose a serious security threat, Washington banned the sale of semiconductors made using American technology to Huawei. The author analyzes that this taught the U.S. government that advanced technology — not just financial systems like the dollar — could also serve as a chokepoint.
U.S. reliance on economic weapons has deepened further under the second Donald Trump administration, according to the author. His predecessors viewed sanctions, tariffs, and export controls as temporary tools to change an adversary's behavior, but President Trump regards them as instruments for permanently reshaping the global economy. Another difference is that Trump wields economic weapons not only against adversaries but also against allies such as South Korea, Canada, and the European Union.
The U.S. economic wars analyzed in the book also feature cases involving Korean companies — including Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and SK hynix (000660.KS) — that joined in the sanctions. In his preface to the Korean edition, the author wrote: "For countries like South Korea, which maintains close economic ties with China while also having a longstanding security alliance with the United States, the choice is never simple." The book poses a weighty challenge to the Korean government and businesses that find themselves unexpectedly caught in the crossfire of Trump's economic war.
884 pages, 43,000 won.