Edward Fishman > 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“These were the days of the deeply repressive yet staunchly pro-American reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In the”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“By this measure, the strategy he had outlined for Condoleezza Rice and Hank Paulson in 2006 was a resounding success. And yet, Iran’s nuclear program had grown by leaps and bounds during Levey’s tenure, and the government in Tehran seemed every bit as committed to its continuing development.”
― 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

“Starting under President Ronald Reagan and especially after the end of the Cold War, Washington saw Russia no longer as a threat to contain but as a prize to be won—for democracy, for capitalism, for American business, and for U.S. geopolitical interests.”
― 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

“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

“The Russians were especially irate, either because Iran had hidden the facility from them or because their own vaunted intelligence services had failed to detect it.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“when Levey launched his campaign in September 2006 to more than $100 in 2008, and Iran sold around 2.5 million such barrels each day. Iran’s oil revenues, which amounted to over $60 billion per year, ensured that the country’s elite—and its nuclear program—were comfortably sheltered from the impact of sanctions.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“In fact, there was mounting evidence that China was backfilling commercial opportunities that Europe, Japan, and others left behind. By the first half of 2011, Iran had few surviving connections to the global economy. But those that endured—its ties to China and, above all, its steady inflow of petrodollars—would be devilishly hard to break, and perhaps impossible to sever before it no longer made a difference.”
― 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

“Because stripping is illegal in the United States—and virtually all global banks had some presence in the United States—any bank that did it risked violating American law and facing serious penalties. A few weeks prior, U.S. financial regulators”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“In 2012 alone, advances in fracking and horizontal drilling caused America’s domestic oil production to shoot up by nearly one million barrels per day—about the same amount that was lost in Iranian supplies. Prices soon stabilized.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“the Green Revolution had badly damaged Ahmadinejad’s standing, and his political rivals were not eager to give him a win by waving the deal through. Obama’s diplomatic push had failed. He had extended a hand, but Tehran’s fist remained clenched.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“In 1982, the IRGC oversaw the creation of Hezbollah, a Lebanese extremist group. In subsequent years, Hezbollah—with training and resources from the IRGC—launched a spate of violent terrorist attacks, including the devastating 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 American service members.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“On November 24, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, an interim deal was struck. Iran agreed to freeze its nuclear program for six months and dispose of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. In return, America would unfreeze $4.2 billion, less than two months’ worth of Iranian oil revenues. Washington would also suspend the sanctions on the car industry and issue a license allowing U.S. and European firms to repair Iran’s rickety fleet of passenger airplanes, many of which age and lack of maintenance had turned into a disaster waiting to happen.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“For years, politicians in Tehran had denied that international pressure was harming their country’s economy. But in the lead-up to the Iranian presidential election in June 2013, one candidate went off script, vowing to free Iran from the constraints of sanctions. He won in a landslide. Within days of Hassan Rouhani’s inauguration in August, Tehran signaled it was ready to negotiate with Washington.”
― 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

“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 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

“In the first eight months of 2012, the value of the rial against the dollar—the closest thing officials in Tehran and Washington had to a scoreboard in the economic war—declined by half.”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“ILSA marked one of the earliest attempts by the United States to wield what became known as “secondary sanctions,”
― Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

“Buoyed by an unprecedented commodities boom, including oil prices that shot up tenfold from 1998 to 2008, Putin repaired the state’s finances, increased living standards, and modernized Russia’s military.”
― 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

“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