Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
In 2025, Eddie Fishman, a former State Department and Treasury official who helped design the sanctions against Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, wrote the playbook on economic warfare, Chokepoints. It not only became a New York Times Bestseller, but a blueprint of what would follow.
So I sat down with Eddie to ask the obvious question. If the dollar and the chip supply chain are the new weapons, what happens when adversaries finally build their own? His answer reframed how I think about stablecoins, China, and the next ten years of geopolitics.
His core insight: the most powerful weapons in modern geopolitics aren't military. They're financial and technological. And they include stablecoins.
“The choke points that the US uses, that China uses, that Europe uses may change over time, but economic warfare will continue. All of our businesses may soon be completely dependent on LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic, and guess what, all three are US companies.”
China (2026): The U.S. controls advanced AI chips and chipmaking tools sales.
Venezuela (2026): The U.S. military utilised Claude, an AI model developed by Anthropic, to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Russia (2022): The U.S. and G7 froze roughly $300B of Russia’s foreign currency reserves held in Western jurisdictions after the Ukraine invasion. Whereas, U.S. and EU sanctions forced companies like Boeing and GE to stop providing spare parts, maintenance, and technical support to Russian airlines.
Interestingly, America doesn’t need to fire a single missile to bring a country to its knees. It just needs to cut off access to the dollar.
FX: ~90% of all global foreign exchange transactions involve the U.S. dollar.
Clearing: Almost all dollar transactions, even those between two non-U.S. banks, must eventually clear through a U.S.-based correspondent bank. These settlements typically pass through two U.S. payment rails: Fedwire & CHIPS.
Because of sanctions, Iran started using Bitcoin as a toll booth for 20% of the world’s oil. [Full story]
Stablecoins: ~99% of the global stablecoin market is denominated in U.S. dollars.
What made this conversation more worthwhile is that Eddie doesn’t just describe the system. He diagnoses where it’s breaking, and he’s specific about why.
On sanction overuse, he mentioned:
“Every single US president in the 21st century, from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden, has imposed sanctions at twice the rate of their predecessor. There has to be a structural driver.”
About Edward: Edward Fishman is a former U.S. diplomat and a leading authority on economic statecraft and international sanctions.
Current roles: Senior Fellow and Director of the Geoeconomics Center at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and an educator at Columbia University.
Government service (2011–2017): Held strategic roles at the State Department, Pentagon, and Treasury. He was a central architect of U.S. sanctions regarding Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the Iran nuclear negotiations.
Thought leadership: New York Times-bestselling author of Chokepoints and a frequent geopolitical analyst for Foreign Affairs, The NY Times, and WSJ.
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🎧 Jump to the best parts
00:00 What Are “Choke Points”?
01:29 The Hidden Power of the Dollar
05:09 What Happens When Sanctions Hit
07:49 Why Countries Are Moving Away from the Dollar
10:50 The End of Globalization?
13:56 Are Sanctions Losing Power?
16:09 AI, Chips, and the Next Economic Weapon
19:18 China’s Real Strategy
21:33 China’s Choke Points vs America’s
25:01 The AI Race: Who Wins?
28:18 Iran, Sanctions, and Escalation
32:53 Europe’s Position in Economic Warfare
36:20 More Sanctions or More Wars?
39:09 Bitcoin, Stablecoins & the Dollar
42:06 What to Watch Next
Important Links
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fishman
Chokepoints: Buy on Amazon
Watch or listen now:
YouTube • Apple Podcasts
My biggest takeaways from this conversation:
1. The dollar is a passport. But alternatives are emerging as well.
According to Eddie, a choke point requires three things: dominant market share (80–90%+), no real substitute, and the ability to inflict asymmetric pain without hurting yourself. By that bar, the U.S. dollar is the most powerful economic weapon in history. It also has the legal authority to lock any company, bank, or government on Earth.
“You usually need 80-90% market share at least. The dollar, 90% of foreign exchange transactions. Rare earth minerals, China controls about 90% of global refining capacity. AI chips, Nvidia has over 90% global market share.”
February 2022 showed what happens when Washington decides to actually use it. Russians lined up at ATMs. The Moscow stock exchange closed for nearly a month. Major Western banks predicted the Russian economy would shrink up to 15%. It shrank ~2%, because Russia clamped down on capital and kept selling oil to whoever would buy it. The chokepoint worked. It just didn’t work as well as people expected.
Russia: After the initial 2014 sanctions over Crimea, it built SPFS (connects over 557 financial institutions across 20 countries) to serve as an alternative to SWIFT, alongside NSPK and the Mir (476M+ cards) payment card network.
China: It built CIPS ($24.47T annual volume) to clear transactions in yuan. The e-CNY is China’s central bank digital currency, and Project m-Bridge is a collaborative platform to move digital money directly between global central banks.
The dominance will not change overnight, but the world is progressing, and power is shifting, with new blockchain-based plumbing, and nations like the UAE, Hong Kong, and Singapore are trying to attract builders.
“If you were to fall asleep today and wake up next year, you’d probably say not much has changed. If you went to sleep today and woke up ten years from now, the world would look totally different.”
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