In the Foreign Affairs article “How to Fight an Economic War,” Edward Fishman argues that economic warfare—through sanctions, export controls, tariffs, and financial pressure—has become a central tool of modern geopolitical competition.
He explains that the global economy is structured around critical “chokepoints” in finance, technology, and supply chains, which allow powers like the United States to exert pressure on rivals such as China, Russia, and Iran.
While these tools can be highly effective, Fishman warns they also carry risks, including retaliation, global economic fragmentation, and the gradual erosion of US leverage if overused. He concludes that effective economic warfare requires precision, allied coordination, and strategic restraint. Fishman writes:
The World Economic Forum at Davos is rarely the site of geopolitical rupture. But this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the assembled executives and dignitaries to declare the end of an era. Globalization, with its promise of win-win cooperation, had given way to intensifying economic warfare. “Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
In Carney’s telling, the giants are on the march, leaving everyone else little choice but to band together in self-defense. Yet his narrative, however resonant, obscures a more volatile reality: in this age of economic warfare, even the great powers feel increasingly insecure. […]
The post–World War II economic order was built through international conferences and agreements—Bretton Woods, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Trade Organization. Today, a new architecture is rising in its place, but rather than following a coherent blueprint, it is being built through unilateral economic interventions, with every new sanction, tariff, export control, and industrial policy haphazardly adding another brick to the foundation.
Policymakers routinely worry about the economic fragmentation that could result. In these pages in 2023, Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned that the world economy could split into rival blocs, reversing decades of integration. But history suggests that blocs are hardly the worst possible outcome. The greater danger is chaotic fragmentation—the kind of every-nation-for-itself scramble that shattered the world economy in the 1930s and led to World War II. […]
The United States ushered in the age of economic warfare by learning to weaponize chokepoints. Now, other countries have learned to do the same. Its advantages have eroded not only because others have built competing forms of leverage but also because Washington has too often used its own advantages carelessly. To thrive in this period of rupture and shape the order that emerges from it, Washington must wage economic warfare in a more disciplined, coordinated, and strategically sustainable way. The alternative is a slide into economic fragmentation that leaves the United States less prosperous and less secure.
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