The predicament of economic warfare: Do sanctions work?

IT USED to be that ravaging another nation’s economic power required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now, as Edward Fishman proposes in Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, all it takes is a statement posted online by the US government.

Chokepoints is a gripping and vivid narrative about the new architecture of geopolitics. It’s one in which the US mobilises its economic and financial pre-eminence for geopolitical objectives; in this context, in its clashes with the “new authoritarians” China, Iran and Russia.

It’s also the story of a world economy that has moved from assured globalisation to increasing fragmentation and in which economic warfare has become “a baseline feature of our world”, as Fishman puts it.