Elites loved this stupid 2025 book.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic story of how America turned the world economy into a weapon, upending decades of globalization to confront a new authoritarian axis—Russia, China, and Iran.
“Deftly written, Chokepoints is a compelling and dramatic narrative about the new shape of geopolitics.”
— Daniel Yergin, The Wall Street Journal“A timely, riveting world tour…[An] absorbing book.”
— The Economist“Remarkable…One of the most important books on economic warfare ever written.”
— Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great PowersSelected as a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Financial Times, Bloomberg, and NPR • Finalist for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award
It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government.
In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top American sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the past two decades of U.S. foreign policy. As Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei wreaked havoc on the world stage, mavericks within the U.S. government built a fearsome new arsenal of economic weapons. Successive U.S. presidents have relied on these weapons to address the most pressing national security threats—for good and for ill.
Chokepoints provides a thrilling account of one of the most transformative developments of our time, demystifying how the U.S. government harnesses the power of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil against America’s enemies. At the center of the narrative are the trailblazing diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes who have masterminded America’s escalating economic wars against Russia, China, and Iran.
Control over economic chokepoints—such as the U.S. dollar, advanced microchip technology, and critical minerals—has become the key to geopolitical power in the twenty-first century. The result is a new world order: an economic arms race among great powers and a fracturing global economy. Chokepoints is the definitive account of how America pioneered a new, hard-hitting style of economic warfare—and how it’s changing the world.
The brilliant author and IR scholar Edward Fishman writes in this book:
They came up with a creative proposal: Foreign banks could continue processing payments for Iranian oil, but only if they agreed to hold the funds in restricted bank accounts in their home country. Iran could use these oil revenues to pay for nonsanctioned imports from the country in which the account was located or to buy humanitarian products like food and medicine—but it could not bring the funds back to Iran. If, say, the Chinese oil firm Sinopec bought Iranian oil, it would pay a Central Bank of Iran account based in China. Tehran could use those funds to buy refrigerators or vacuum cleaners from China—or food or medicine from anywhere in the world—but the money could not come home. Tehran could not, therefore, use the money to bolster its nuclear program, fund its military, prop up Hezbollah, or line the pockets of regime insiders.
In essence, the scheme would compel the creation of overseas escrow accounts, where Iran’s oil wealth would accumulate instead of flowing back to the Iranian regime. Washington wouldn’t drive Iran’s oil sales to zero. But this strategy would afford Tehran close to zero access to its oil money. Cohen back-channeled the idea to Brad Gordon, AIPAC’s policy
director, while Szubin shared it with key staffers on Capitol Hill. Before long, the requirement to establish escrow accounts surfaced in a new piece of legislation, the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act, which sailed through Congress and was signed into law by Obama in August 2012. The measure would go into effect early the following year, giving Cohen and Szubin time to pursue financial diplomacy to increase its odds of success.
You would think that an author with Fishman’s credentials would understand that money is fungible. Apparently not. He describes David Cohen’s 2012 brainchild (the escrow-account trick that became law in the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act) and sells it as a stroke of genius: “Tehran could not, therefore, use the money to bolster its nuclear program, fund its military, prop up Hezbollah, or line the pockets of regime insiders… this strategy would afford Tehran close to zero access to its oil money.”
That “therefore” is doing heroic work. It assumes that because the specific dollars from Sinopec’s oil purchase are trapped in a Chinese escrow account and can only be spent on Chinese refrigerators or global food/medicine, those dollars have somehow been surgically removed from the Iranian budget.
Apparently, the elite reviewers of this book do not understand the fungibility of money either.
The fungibility blind spot isn’t a footnote—it’s the entire analytical floor collapsing under the book’s own thesis. Fishman spends chapters 8–21 walking through the Obama-era Iran playbook: slashing oil export volumes, then herding the remaining revenues into overseas escrow accounts (Japan, South Korea, Turkey, etc.) that Tehran could tap only for “humanitarian” imports—food, medicine, whatever the compliance officers approved. The narrative frames this as a precision scalpel: squeeze the regime’s cash flow while letting civilians breathe, force them to the table for the JCPOA, and—voilà—strategic success. Nowhere does the text grapple with the obvious: once you’ve capped total oil revenue and ring-fenced the remainder for permitted spending, you haven’t reduced Iran’s discretionary budget by a rial. The Revolutionary Guard’s accountants simply treat the escrowed dollars as the new baseline for groceries and hospital beds (things the Islamic Republic was going to buy anyway) and reroute every freed-up rial from other accounts straight into the Quds Force pipeline. Hezbollah rockets, Hamas tunnels, Houthi drones—same fungible pot. The book treats the restriction as a meaningful constraint rather than an accounting shell game. That omission isn’t ignorance; it’s the narrative filter at work.
Why do elites lap up this nonsense? Because this is comfort food for the “buffered strategic managed autonomous” class. The blurbs tell the story—Daniel Yergin, Paul Kennedy, The Economist, Financial Times, Bloomberg, NYT bestseller. These aren’t independent validators; they’re the same prestige circuit that rewards books in which the heroes are “mavericks within the U.S. government,” “trailblazing diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes,” and the plot is “we turned the world economy into a weapon without the messiness of actual war.” It flatters the worldview that complex adaptive systems (Iran’s patronage networks, Russia’s parallel import machine, China’s tech indigenization) can be tamed by sufficiently clever spreadsheets and multilateral communiqués.
This is the same managerial optimism, same refusal to admit the system being managed is smarter than the managers. Adversaries don’t sit still. Iran’s oil revenues funded proxies long before and long after the escrow gimmick. Russia kept its war economy humming through shadow fleets and third-country cutouts. The October 7 massacre, Red Sea shipping attacks, and the grinding Ukraine stalemate happened while the “fearsome new arsenal” was supposedly at peak lethality. By early 2026, with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and Washington quietly issuing temporary general licenses to let stranded Iranian (and Russian) oil hit the market so prices don’t explode, the chokepoints look less like iron gates and more like speed bumps with excellent PR.
Fishman’s book is still a riveting procedural—great on the bureaucratic knife fights, the SWIFT cutoffs, the secondary sanctions diplomacy. But it mistakes process for outcome. It celebrates the ingenuity of the architects and demystifies the tools for an audience that wants to feel “in the room” without ever being asked the basic consequentialist question: did any of this actually change the adversary’s behavior in the way we intended, net of all adaptation? The answer, repeatedly, has been “not really.” The prestige ecosystem rewarded the version that says “yes, and here’s how the smart people did it.”
I guess elites did not read this book for understanding, but only for the dopamine hit of elite competence porn. Most of the admirers were doing the latter. The book ages like milk the moment real-world feedback (kinetic war with Iran, sanctions waivers to stabilize oil prices, proxies still armed to the teeth) arrives. The “Impossible Trinity” conclusion gestures at the tension between interdependence, security, and competition—but even there, the book can’t quite admit that the managerial toolkit keeps producing the opposite of what it promises.
It’s hilarious how Fishman writes with complete confidence that Tehran could not use the escrowed money to fund its military, prop up Hezbollah, or line the pockets of regime insiders. He states this as though it follows logically from the restriction. It does not follow at all. It is the fungibility error stated in its purest form, presented as though it were a self-evident conclusion rather than a claim that requires an argument.
The logic Fishman is missing is simple enough to state in one sentence. If Iran was going to spend money on refrigerators and vacuum cleaners and food and medicine anyway, and the escrow accounts now cover those purchases, then every rial Iran would otherwise have spent on refrigerators is now freed up to spend on Hezbollah rockets. The restriction does not reduce Iran’s total discretionary budget. It reorganizes which pot of money covers which category of spending while leaving the total unchanged.
The only way the escrow mechanism constrains proxy funding is if Iran was spending more on humanitarian and consumer goods than it had money for, and the escrow accounts provided additional capacity for those purchases beyond what Iran could otherwise afford. But that is not the framing. The framing is that the accounts capture existing oil revenues and restrict their use. If the revenues were already going to be spent on permitted goods, the restriction changes nothing except the accounting.
What makes this passage particularly revealing is the phrase Tehran could not, therefore, use the money. The therefore is doing all the work and it is doing it illegitimately. Nothing in the preceding description of the mechanism supports that conclusion. The therefore smuggles in the assumption that money is not fungible, that restricting one pool of money from a specific use actually prevents that use rather than simply shifting which pool of money covers it.
Fishman was a senior sanctions official. He was presumably in rooms where this mechanism was designed and celebrated. The people who designed it were Treasury lawyers and financial diplomats of genuine sophistication. And yet the therefore sits there unexamined, as though no one in any of those rooms asked the basic question.
The most charitable interpretation is that the mechanism was never really about constraining proxy funding. It was about constraining nuclear program funding specifically, which might be harder to route through alternative accounts because of the specialized procurement requirements for nuclear technology. If that is the actual claim, it is a much narrower and more defensible argument. But Fishman does not make that narrower claim. He claims the mechanism prevents funding of the military broadly, Hezbollah specifically, and regime enrichment generally. Those are the claims that the fungibility argument demolishes.
The book was celebrated as one of the most important books on economic warfare ever written. Paul Kennedy said that. The mechanism at the center of the Iran campaign, the escrow scheme that the book treats as a masterwork of financial statecraft, rests on a logical error that a first-year economics student would catch. And the Iran war is now raging, the proxies are armed, and the United States is issuing temporary general licenses to let Iranian oil onto the market because the energy price consequences of maximum pressure are politically intolerable.
The therefore is the book in miniature. Confident. Sophisticated-sounding. Celebrated by the prestige ecosystem. And wrong in a way that any careful reader paying attention to basic logic could see on the first pass.
The biography explains everything and confirms everything.
Yale undergraduate. Cambridge MPhil. Stanford MBA with Arjay Miller Scholar distinction. State Department, Defense Department, Treasury Department. Policy Planning Staff. Foreign Affairs editor. Atlantic Council. Center for a New American Security. Columbia adjunct professor. Two State Department Superior Honor Awards.
This is the complete curriculum vitae of the buffered strategic managed autonomous worldview. Every credential, every institution, every award is a node in the same prestige network that reviewed the book, blurbed the book, gave the book awards, and assigned the book to students. The feedback loop is perfectly closed. The people who designed the Iran escrow mechanism gave Fishman awards for his work on it. He then wrote a book celebrating it. The people at the institutions where he holds fellowships reviewed and celebrated the book. None of them asked the fungibility question because asking it would implicate all of them simultaneously.
The Arjay Miller Scholar designation at Stanford GSB is particularly telling. That program selects for the top five percent of the MBA class. It rewards a specific kind of analytical sophistication: the ability to master complex institutional and financial mechanisms, to understand how organizations work, to communicate clearly about strategic problems. It does not select for the willingness to ask whether the entire framework is built on a logical error. Stanford MBA culture, like the rest of the institutions on this CV, rewards people who can operate brilliantly within a framework. It does not particularly reward people who question whether the framework achieves its stated purpose.
The Iran sanctions team from 2013 to 2014 is the specific biographical detail that matters most. Fishman was not just an analyst of the escrow mechanism. He was a participant in designing and implementing it. The book is therefore not primarily an analytical work about economic warfare. It is a memoir of bureaucratic innovation written by someone who cannot evaluate his own work objectively because the work is his identity. The Superior Honor Awards are literal institutional certification that the work was excellent.
Concluding that the escrow mechanism was an accounting shell game that left proxy funding unchanged would require Fishman to conclude that the awards were given for sophisticated process work that failed to achieve its strategic purpose. That is not a conclusion a person with this biography is structurally positioned to reach.
This is why the therefore sits unexamined in the text. It is not an oversight. It is a psychological necessity. The entire edifice of his career, his credentials, his awards, his fellowship appointments, and his book contract rests on the premise that the work he did was strategically meaningful. The fungibility argument does not just challenge a claim in chapter eight. It challenges the justification for the entire career.
The prestige ecosystem surrounding him is equally unable to raise the question because the same ecosystem certified the work in real time. The State Department gave him awards. Foreign Affairs published his articles. The Atlantic Council and Center for a New American Security hired him as a fellow. These institutions cannot now conclude that the mechanism they certified was logically flawed without implicating their own judgment. So they do not conclude that. They give the book more awards instead.
What you are observing is not elite stupidity. It is elite self-sealing. The credential system, the award system, the fellowship system, the publishing system, and the review system are all operated by the same network of people whose careers are built on the premise that the work they do achieves what it claims to achieve. The consequentialist question, did this actually work in the way we said it would, is the one question the entire network is structurally incentivized not to ask seriously.
Fishman is not a charlatan in the sense of knowing his argument is wrong and saying it anyway. He is something more interesting and more troubling: a genuinely intelligent person who has been so thoroughly formed by a prestige ecosystem that rewards process sophistication over outcome honesty that he literally cannot see the logical gap in his own central argument. The therefore is invisible to him because seeing it would require him to stand outside the framework that made him, and the framework has been so thoroughly internalized that standing outside it is not a position he can occupy.
Yale to Cambridge to Stanford to State to Treasury to Columbia to Atlantic Council to New York Times bestseller. At no point in that trajectory does the selection process ask: but did the thing you built do what you said it would do. It asks instead: did you demonstrate sophisticated command of institutional processes, did you receive recognition from the right institutions, did you communicate clearly to the right audiences. Fishman has done all of those things at the highest possible level. He has not been asked the consequentialist question and the Iran war is now providing the answer anyway, in the form that consequentialist questions always eventually produce when they go unasked long enough.
Elites aren’t stupid, they just sound stupid when they praise this stupid book. Elites, including the author, are genuinely intelligent. So why do they sound so dumb so often? Because the selection pressures that produce elites systematically filter for certain kinds of intelligence while filtering against others.
The kind of intelligence that gets you to Treasury, State, the Council on Foreign Relations, a Henry Holt contract, or a Financial Times best book award is the intelligence that produces sophisticated process narratives within an existing framework. You need to understand how SWIFT works, how secondary sanctions are structured, how multilateral coalitions are assembled, how bureaucratic knife fights inside the interagency process get resolved. That is real knowledge and it takes real intelligence to acquire. What it does not require, and what the selection process does not reward, is the willingness to ask whether the framework itself is wrong.
The fungibility argument is not a sophisticated technical insight. It is a basic consequentialist question that any careful reader should ask. But asking it threatens the entire edifice. If Iran’s proxy funding was not actually constrained by the escrow mechanism, then the Obama Iran strategy was not a precision scalpel. It was an accounting shell game that produced a nuclear deal while leaving the regional proxy network intact. That conclusion implicates not just Fishman but the entire class of people who designed, implemented, celebrated, and wrote about the strategy. The Financial Times reviewers, the Paul Kennedy blurbers, the Daniel Yergin endorsers: all of them are implicated in the failure to ask the obvious question.
This is Trivers’ self-deception operating at civilizational scale. The elites who built the sanctions apparatus genuinely believed it was working because believing it was working was necessary to maintain the institutional investments, the career trajectories, and the self-image that the apparatus supported. The Treasury lawyer who spent a decade designing escrow mechanisms cannot easily conclude that the escrow mechanisms were irrelevant to proxy funding without also concluding that a significant fraction of his career was spent on an elaborate exercise in the appearance of control. That is a psychologically catastrophic conclusion and the mind resists it with considerable force.
The prestige ecosystem compounds the problem by creating an information environment in which the feedback that would correct the error never reaches the people who made it. The Iran escrow designers did not sit in the room where Revolutionary Guard accountants decided how to route proxy funding around the restrictions. The fungibility logic was visible in principle to anyone who thought about it, but the institutional culture rewarded people who mastered the complexity of designing restrictions, not people who questioned whether the restrictions achieved their stated purpose. The question was structurally discouraged because asking it loudly enough to matter would have required someone to tell their boss, their boss’s boss, and the Secretary of State that the centerpiece of their Iran strategy had an obvious logical flaw.
There is also what you might call the complexity premium. In elite professional culture, complicated answers are presumed to be more sophisticated than simple ones. The person who says the escrow mechanism is an accounting shell game because of fungibility sounds like they are missing the sophisticated multilateral diplomatic architecture that the mechanism represents. The person who explains the mechanism in detail, with references to secondary sanctions, compliance officer protocols, and interagency coordination, sounds like they understand the subject. Sophistication is performed through complexity, and complexity systematically obscures the simple question of whether any of it works.
Ernest Becker’s hero system is operating here too. The managerial elite’s hero system is organized around the belief that complex problems can be managed by sufficiently skilled and credentialed people using the right institutional tools. Economic warfare without blowback. Information state management without censorship. Violent populism contained by elite signaling. These are all versions of the same promise: that the world is governable by people like us, and that the evidence of governance failure reflects insufficient application of our tools rather than the inadequacy of the tools themselves. A book that confirms this promise gets Paul Kennedy blurbs and Financial Times awards. A book that challenges it gets remaindered.
The Iran war now raging, the Houthi campaign, October 7, the sanctions waivers issued to stabilize oil prices: all of this is the world administering the consequentialist test that the book and the prestige ecosystem refused to administer. The test is not subtle. When you have to quietly issue temporary general licenses allowing Iranian oil sales because the alternative is energy market chaos, you have demonstrated in the most concrete possible terms that the chokepoints were speed bumps with excellent PR, as your document puts it. The elite response to this failure will not be a systematic reassessment of the framework. It will be a series of explanations for why this particular application of the framework was imperfect and what a better-designed version would look like.
This is how elite expertise reproduces itself despite persistent failure. The framework is never wrong. The application was wrong. The next application will be better. The people who design the next application will be the same people who designed the last one, advised by the people who wrote books celebrating the last one, reviewed by the people who gave those books awards. The feedback loop that would produce genuine learning is closed off by the institutional incentives that reward the appearance of competence over the acknowledgment of failure.
I read the book to understand. Most of the admirers read it to feel that people like them are in charge of things and know what they are doing. Those are different activities producing different conclusions from the same text. The elites are not silly in the sense of being incapable of the fungibility argument. They are silly in the sense of being systematically insulated from the consequences of not making it.