Chokepoints Quotes

“We don’t yet know when the Age of Economic Warfare will end, but we can envision how. The trade-offs facing policymakers in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow can be thought of as an impossible trinity consisting of economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition. Any two of these can coexist but not all three.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“For much of the past three decades, China and Russia used their extensive economic ties with the United States to modernize their militaries and erect extensive surveillance states. U.S. officials went along with and often encouraged this process. Unfettered trade and investment were understood to be natural and ultimately benevolent, especially when American businesses were making money. Washington is now using economic weapons to change course,”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“It’s no accident that the rise of economic warfare in U.S. foreign policy in the mid-2000s came on the heels of two costly and ultimately failed American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Washington’s heightened interest in sanctions was driven as much by confidence in their efficacy as by disillusionment with the main alternative, military force.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“But there’s also a risk that China’s weaponization of critical minerals will lead to a spiraling economic war that destroys every last shred of the U.S.-China economic relationship. The hard reality is that, in the coming years, the scramble for economic security is likelier to break the global economy than it is to break just the chokepoints.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“In the years ahead, China may well build deeper capital markets or even loosen capital controls, but it cannot match the fundamental advantages of the dollar unless it revamps its entire political system for the better or America’s is”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“The world economy is experiencing what scholars call a “security dilemma”: as one state builds up its economic arsenal to improve its security, others feel less secure and build up their own arsenals in turn. The resulting economic arms race will likely intensify in the years ahead. And as soon as government or business leaders come to view an economic dependency as a vulnerability, they cannot unsee it. Even if a new U.S. administration vowed to restrain the use of sanctions, Chinese leaders would still not feel comfortable relying so heavily on the dollar. Likewise, no amount of reassurance from Beijing would placate American concerns about depending on China for pharmaceuticals or critical minerals. Trust, once lost, is not easily regained.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“If the great powers no longer fear one another’s economic weapons, a new stability could take hold. The world will lose the efficiency and low prices enabled by economic interdependence, but it will gain a sense of security. Supply chains will return home, and employment opportunities will multiply. The world will be divided into economic blocs, yet it will be at peace.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“Today, another shift is looming. Russian imperialism and China’s bid for world mastery have brought geopolitical competition back with a vengeance.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“Globalization’s triumphant march first slowed during the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing political backlash across industrialized economies, which saw an explosion of populist anger over decades of worsening domestic inequality and the steady decline of manufacturing. But its retreat set in for good only after governments began viewing economic interdependence as a liability rather than an asset: because the economies of all the great powers were linked to one another, governments could exploit chokepoints to pressure rivals.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“Fixed exchange rates, originally considered a guarantor of stability, became a source of distrust and resentment. Multinational corporations found ways to dodge capital controls, and their efforts gradually won backing from a few self-interested governments. When Bretton Woods met its demise in the early 1970s, it collapsed under the weight”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“Unfortunately, political dysfunction has deprived the United States of economic assets that several other countries possess. In the years to come, fighting and winning economic wars will only get harder, especially as China and other countries strengthen both their offensive capabilities and their defensive fortifications. The United States cannot afford to rest on its laurels. It must continuously improve its economic arsenal and make domestic investments that solidify its global lead in finance and technology, which, after all, are the foundation of American power.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“The long-standing misconduct of Chinese authorities and companies in their dealings with the West, ranging from intellectual property theft to forced technology transfer to unfair trade practices, was not motivated by a simple desire for economic gain; it was integral to China’s strategy to replace the United States atop the geopolitical pecking order. Huawei was at the forefront of this strategy—it was nominally the largest private company in China, but it was actually the tip of the spear of the CCP’s grand designs.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“A major escalation of sanctions against China would carry even starker risks—blowback against the U.S. economy would be guaranteed. It’s thus imperative for U.S. officials who are strategizing for a potential Taiwan conflict to heed political realities, devise proactive steps to mitigate harm, and prepare the American people for the costs they may have to endure.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“But the lasting damage they inflicted on Russia’s economy will prevent the country from regaining its pre-war economic or military power anytime soon. In this sense, they corrected a fatal flaw in globalization: the ability of a revisionist state like Putin’s Russia to profit from the U.S.-led world order at the same time as it strove to upend it. When”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“It would be devilishly hard—if not impossible—for China to build a vertically integrated domestic industry that could produce chips equal to those made with best-in-class technology from the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. That won’t stop China from trying, however, and it seems probable that Beijing will spend untold sums striving to catch up to the West on semiconductors without ever getting there.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“It turned out the Chinese companies achieved this feat by using less advanced ASML lithography machines, pirated American software, and a huge repository of Western equipment and spare parts they had hoarded before the latest export controls kicked in. The manufacturing process was much slower and costlier than TSMC’s for making comparable chips; it wasn’t even clear it could be done profitably. But that didn’t matter for the Chinese government, which was happy to cover any losses.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“As a result, the greatest threat to the dollar’s supremacy and, in turn, the U.S. economic arsenal may emanate not from China but from America’s own political system. If a future U.S. administration politicizes the Fed and ends its monetary policy independence—or worse, if the justice system is debased and the rule of law called into question—the advantages of the dollar over the renminbi would begin to fade.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“For all the fear in foreign capitals about U.S. sanctions, America’s approach to economic warfare has been less capricious than that of its chief superpower rival. It is one thing to freeze Russia’s central bank reserves after it launched a war of conquest in clear violation of international law; it is quite another to slap a trade embargo on Australia for merely proposing a probe into the origins of COVID,”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“This means it can change hands without the use of any intermediaries. From the perspective of U.S. financial power, the e-CNY has all the downsides of crypto plus another: Beijing can monitor all transactions.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“The e-CNY is a direct liability on the balance sheet of China’s central bank—effectively the digital equivalent of cash.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“A pilot version of this digital renminbi, also known as the e-CNY, launched in 2020. Since then, the Chinese government has facilitated the e-CNY’s adoption by hundreds of millions of citizens, making it the world’s most widely used state-backed digital currency.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“Put simply, although China sells the most stuff, it struggles to get buyers to pay in anything other than dollars.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“The Fed’s aggressive interventions did far more to shore up faith in the dollar than U.S. sanctions have ever done to shake it.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“Yet the dollar has only become more essential in the years since, in large part owing to American monetary policy. As the world teetered on the brink of a financial meltdown in 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve came to the rescue by extending swap lines to other major central banks, fashioning itself as the global lender of last resort.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“The watchword in Washington was no longer “free trade” but rather “secure trade.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“In truth, no one required companies around the world to use the dollar for cross-border transactions; they did so because of its convenience and reliability, and because there was no good alternative. Yet the United States had taken active steps to propel the dollar to its lofty status, starting with the creation of the post–World War II Bretton Woods system and the Marshall Plan. Deals to price oil in dollars, negotiated with Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, further solidified the currency’s hegemony, as did Western policies to deregulate finance in subsequent decades. More recently, the Fed’s massive interventions to contain global financial crises, first in 2008 and again during the 2020 COVID shock, had a similar effect. Chinese officials also helped sustain the dollar’s role, albeit inadvertently, by prioritizing the CCP’s authoritarian control rather than reforms that might enable the renminbi to compete with the dollar internationally.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“Thanks to globalization,” Alan Greenspan said in 2007, shortly after retiring as Fed chair, “policy decisions in the U.S. have been largely replaced by global market forces.” But as the years that followed showed, global market forces were no match for the states that controlled critical economic chokepoints. The era of unfettered free markets was over, collateral damage of a world at economic war.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“axis signaled a new phase for the world economy, one that would be fundamentally different from the era of globalization that preceded”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“worked hard to finalize Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization, a nineteen-year process that concluded soon after Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“With unfettered access to the U.S. financial system, Russian businesses amassed more than $700 billion in external debt. The Obama”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare