Today we are accustomed to the use of economic sanctions as central tools of foreign policy. Many people may be surprised to discover, however, that this is actually a rather recent development. Sanctions used to be akin to a slap on the wrist — they would be used to target foreign leaders and their inner circles, making it harder for them to moor their yachts in the Mediterranean or purchase mansions in London. Now, of course, sanctions are among states’ most powerful weapons for waging economic warfare.

In a new book, Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War, Edward Fishman describes how sanctions have been transformed over the past several decades. Fishman has worked in the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Treasury, where he spent several years in the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence team designing sanctions on states like Iran. Chokepoints is accordingly an insider’s account of how the United States developed an armory of powerful sanctions based on its control over the world’s financial system — and how the overuse of these tools ended up undermining their effectiveness, ultimately compromising US hegemony itself.