Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577

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I'm most concerned about, and I cover quite a bit in the book, is the way in which China has its finger on global telecom networks. And this was really the reason why the first Trump administration started trying to bring Huawei down to size, because Huawei was a Chinese company quickly dominating global 5G networks.
Even to this day, there's a lot of our telecom networks that are dependent on Chinese base stations and routers. I am concerned about China's ability to shut down our communications in a true break glass conflict scenario.
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Hey, PassionStruck fam.

Welcome to episode 577.

Whether you're a longtime listener or tuning in for the first time, I am thrilled you're here. You're now part of a global movement dedicated to living with intention, unlocking your full potential, and making what truly matters matter most.
So let me ask you, what if the most important weapons in today's world aren't missiles, tanks, or cyber attacks, but financial leverage, supply chains, and control over economic choke points? What if the future of global power isn't determined on the battlefield, but in boardrooms, central banks, and trade networks? Today's guest, Edward Fishman, is here to unpack this seismic shift in global strategy. A former top State Department sanctions official, Edward has been at the forefront of America's economic warfare efforts, helping to design sanctions against Russia and Iran.
Now, in his groundbreaking book, Choke Points, American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, he takes us behind the scenes to reveal how economic weapons, like sanctions, export controls, and financial dominance, are reshaping global power dynamics. In today's episode, we explore how economic warfare has become the primary tool of statecraft in the 21st century, what choke points are, and why controlling them is the key to global influence, the hidden history of how the U.S.
pioneered economic weapons long before most of us even noticed, how Russia, China, and other nations are fighting back by building alternative economic systems, and the risks of overusing economic power, and whether we're headed toward a fractured global economy. If you've ever wondered how global conflicts are really fought today, or how the economy itself can be weaponized, this episode is for you.
Edwards Insights will challenge your understanding of power, security, and the invisible forces shaping our world. Before we dive in, let's take a moment to reflect on last week's incredible episodes.
On Tuesday, Randy Blight, the legendary Lamb of God frontman joined me to talk about art purpose resilience and the creative process. His journey from self-destruction to artistic mastery is one of the most raw and insightful conversations we've had on the show.
Then on Thursday, I was joined by my friend, Dr. Scott Schur, and we explored the cutting edge world of health optimization and did a deep dive on the GABA system and how it impacts brain function, stress resistance, longevity, and mental clarity, and why the future of health is about personalized, proactive well-being.
Each of these conversations was packed with insights on transformation, resilience, and unlocking potential, and they tie directly into today's episode. Whether it's about redefining personal power, optimizing your health, or understanding global power shifts, intentionality is the common thread.
And do you want to dive deeper? If today's episode sparks your curiosity, check out our episode starter packs, curated playlists that explore topics like leadership, economic power, and resilience. You can find them on Spotify or at passionstruck.com slash starter packs.
For weekly insights and strategies, sign up for my Live Intentionally newsletter. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
Now, let that journey begin. Hey, PassionStruck fam.
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I am absolutely thrilled to welcome Edward Fishman to the PassionStruck podcast.

Welcome, Eddie.

How are you today?

John, thanks so much for having me on.

I'm doing great.

Well, I want to start off by just congratulating you on this great book that I'm holding up.

It's titled Choke Points, American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

And we're airing today's episode on the day it releases.

Congratulations to you.

Thank you. I know it's an experience you've had,

but it's surreal to work on a book for several years and actually hold it in your hand.

I remember that first time I got that, a set of books, and it's just this overwhelming feeling

when you finally see the real thing and you're not looking at it on the screen, but you're holding these words that you've put years and years into the making. It's just something surreal about it.
I can attest to it. And it's even, I feel very grateful to have it out there and hope other people enjoy reading it.
Eddie, I'm going to start here. Your book opens up with a striking image, oil tankers stuck in a maritime traffic jam at the Bosphorus as Russia's war against Ukraine rages in 2022.
It's a powerful scene and one that immediately brought me back to my time in the Navy. When I was on destroyers and cruisers, we would often sit in the Sea of Marmara right at that choke point, watching the flow of ships through the strait.
For those who may not be familiar with these dynamics, can you break down what a choke point is in an economic sense? And why did you use this concept as the title and metaphor of your book? Sure. Thanks, John.
And I think especially grateful to have this conversation today, because someone who's served in the Navy understands choke points in a visceral sense, I think. So throughout history, when you've talked about choke points, you're usually thinking about

geographic features. So a strait is the classic example of a choke point.
It's a narrow waterway

through which very significant trade flows depend. So for instance, when we're talking about the Bosphorus, which is the exit way from the Black Sea onward to the Mediterranean, every single day, you've got 3 million barrels of oil that are going through that choke point.
And it's very narrow. Anyone who's been in Istanbul can attest to it.
You also have a very significant part of the world's food supply that's going through that choke point every day. So throughout history, these choke points have really been thought of as geographic features.
But as you say, John, in the book, the choke points I'm talking about are really novel choke points and choke points that have developed only in the last 20 years or so in the wake of the hyper-globalization of the 1990s. And these are economic choke points.
These are parts of the global economy where one country has a dominant role and there's very little, if any, redundancy. And so typically, if you go back even 20, 30 years and even thousands of years, the way that you would block a choke point like the Bosphorus was to take a Navy ship and park it right in front of it.
You would need basically to use military force to stop ships from going through that choke point. The novelty that we have today is a situation where the U.S.
and other countries, primarily the United States, can use these economic choke points in global supply chains and financial flows to cut off these physical trade flows just by using the stroke of a pen. So in that scene that you mentioned, in December of 2022, the US government, in addition to several allies in Europe and the Japanese government, imposed a price cap on Russian oil.
And this, all it really was a regulation issued by Washington, Brussels, and a few other capitals. And overnight, it blocked the Bosphorus.
So something that, you know, for thousands of years would have required the actual use of naval force to do today can be done by an official sitting behind her desk in Washington, DC. It is so interesting to me how your book really lays out how economic warfare has evolved

into America's primary tool of statecraft.

And what you were just describing is we now have these new weapons to fight wars.

One of those is cyber warfare, which I'm very well familiar with because that's what I did in my career. But we've also reached a moment where these financial weapons that you were just describing have taken precedence over military ones.
How did we reach this point? That's a great question. And the main thesis of my book, John, is that we're living in an age of economic warfare.
Sanctions, tariffs, export controls, they have become the primary way that great powers like the United States and China compete with one another. I think there are really three factors that led to this.
The first is something I mentioned just a few moments ago, which is economics. In the 1990s, with hyper globalization, the integration of supply chains that previously had not been, like the United States and China and the former Soviet Union breaking up and the US trying to bring Russia into the WTO and other international economic structures.
You see these development of these choke points where every trade that happens in the world basically depends on the use of the dollar or every major piece of personal communication device or even any electronic device, even automobiles, depends on computer chips that rely on US technology. So this is really an economic factor that led to the rise of these choke points that then could be weaponized by governments like the US government.
Then there are other factors too. There's a political factor.
I think that's really important, which is if you go back to the 90s, the U.S. actually was pretty comfortable deploying military force.
The 90s, we had a number of small sort of short military campaigns that we fought in places like the Balkans and Africa. And that was something that America had become accustomed to and comfortable with.
But then, of course, after 9-11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wind up eroding political support for military force in the United States, not just on one side of the aisle, but really on both sides of the aisle. So you get to a point where in the mid-2000s, it's become politically toxic to try to say that the US should be bombing another country or invading another country.
And in some ways, economic warfare became appealing for that reason, because the other tool, military force, had become less appealing. Then the final factor is a geopolitical factor.
And it's really the rise of Russia and China and the return of great power competition. And in the 90s, we had this situation where we didn't think we were going to have great power competition.
And that's part of the reason we went for things like hyperglobalization. Then all of a sudden, it becomes quite clear in the latter part of the aughts after Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, after Xi Jinping becomes the head of China in early 2010s and starts militarizing the South China Sea, becomes clear that great power competition is very much alive again.
And yet the US, China, Russia are pretty constrained in fighting one another by the specter of nuclear annihilation. You still do have nuclear deterrence.
And so it means that this competition is channeled primarily through the economic arena. So I think those three factors are really what created this age of economic warfare we're living in today.
What's so interesting, just last night, my wife and I were talking about Afghanistan, Iraq, the events of 9-11. And we were going back to presidential elections.
And I can't remember in my lifetime if there's ever been a Democratic candidate who has followed an incumbent or a Republican candidate who has followed an incumbent. It's like we keep swapping back and forth.
But the question I was pondering as I was thinking about today's interview is after the Clinton presidency, what would have happened had Al Gore become president? Would we have even gone into Iraq? Would this have led to Afghanistan? Would we have gone down the path where we are today? What are your thoughts on that? It's a great question. Obviously, you have to go through a number of different hypotheticals and counterfactuals.
But let's assume that Al Gore is elected and you still have 9-11, because obviously 9-11 is the precipitating event that causes those wars. Because obviously if you don't have 9-11, you wouldn't have those wars.
So let's just assume you have Gore as president and you have 9-11. My guess is you still have significant military action against Afghanistan because it was very clear that the Taliban were harboring Al-Qaeda.
They played a direct facilitating role in the 9-11 attacks. So I'm relatively confident you would have seen some sort of military campaign there, whether it would have turned into a protracted 20-year nation-building exercise, harder to say.
The war in Iraq, I think, is a different story. And I do think that the war in Iraq, the historical record shows it was very much a war of choice.
There were specific officials in the George W. Bush administration who thought that basically George H.
W. Bush hadn't finished the job and basically shouldn't have allowed Saddam to stay in power after the Gulf War in the early 90s.
They thought that the sanctions that were in place in the 90s on Iraq were not working. These are people like Donald Rumsfeld.
And I think they were pretty excited about the idea of invading Iraq, overthrowing Saddam and trying to usher in regime change across the Middle East. I think that is a fairly unique historical circumstance.
I don't think if Al Gore were president, you would have had the same types of people in power around him. So I would say you probably still have a war in Afghanistan, unclear what it would look like, but almost certainly you wouldn't have had the type of invasion of Iraq we had in 2003.
I just look back upon that time and Colin Powell has been someone I've always admired. And I had the chance to meet him one time and was such a humble person.
And I always feel as I've looked back upon that time, how misled he felt when he went to the UN, et cetera, over something that it turns out wasn't even factual.

Yeah, look. upon that time, how misled he felt when he went to the UN, et cetera, over something that turns out wasn't even factual.
Yeah. Look, John, if you might not mind, because I think this is something, there's an interesting thread here, which is Colin Powell is the secretary of state at the time, right? He didn't use a career military officer.
He had been the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff previously. And his whole thing that he was pressing early in the Bush administration was smart sanctions.
So he was very in favor of actually using economic warfare instead of

military warfare. And ironically, it's people who didn't have as long military careers like him,

like Donald Rumsfeld, that wind up having more influence in the administration.

And it's a very good point because I've seen firsthand being in combat zones is not

what it's all cracked up to be. And if we can avoid them, we should at all costs.
So let's get back to the book here for a second. For decades, globalization was seen as the key to prosperity and stability.
And over the past years, that belief has unraveled. How does economic warfare fit into that shift? That's a great question because there's some belief, there's some people who say that it is actually the use of tools like sanctions that has undermined globalization.
And if only the U.S. weren't using sanctions and export controls and tariffs, we would still be happily in the kind of halcyon 1990s.
My own view is that's not right. And there's actually an underlying structural factor that has led to the rise of the age of economic warfare.
The reason I feel confident about this is, John, you mentioned how we vacillated between Democratic and Republican presidents. But one thing is state constant.
If you look from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Joe Biden, each of those presidents effectively doubled the number of sanctions that their predecessor had imposed in their tenure in the White House.
So this has been a secular trend. So for someone like me, I start looking for, well, what's going on underneath the hood? Why is this the case? And I came up with this notion that I call the impossible trinity, where economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition, of those three factors, only two of them can coexist at a time.
So if you look at the Cold War era, we had obviously very fierce geopolitical competition between the US and the Soviet Union, but we didn't have any economic interdependence. The US and Soviet Union barely had any trade with

each other. And so we were still able to have economic security.
After the cold war, this sort

of hyper-globalization period, we didn't think we had any geopolitical competition. We saw Russia

and China more as budding friends than ominous rivals. And so we embraced economic interdependence

without losing our sense of economic security. I think what's happened, John, unfortunately, is that neither China nor Russia evolved in the way that we hoped and neither moved in a democratic direction.
They both became increasingly authoritarian, increasingly aggressive, imperialistic in their objectives. And so what happened was in the 2010s, we saw a situation in which we still had economic interdependence and geopolitical competition had come roaring back.
So we lost our sense of economic security. And so the way I view that is we obviously, as the American people, want economic security.
We don't want to feel like our livelihoods are dependent on the whims of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. And so the accumulation of restrictions like tariffs and sanctions and export controls is just a natural outgrowth of that, where the US is trying to restore a sense of economic security that we've lost.
And by the way, other countries are doing this too. The European Union has been imposing more tariffs and sanctions.
China has, Japan has. Japan even has a cabinet minister for economic security now, and Russia has too.
So I think this is a global phenomenon we're seeing. Because of what I did in the military, I have a lifetime ban of ever going to Russia, but I have been to China many times.
And I have to say the last time I was there, it was a profound change. I was in Beijing.
And when I started going over there in the 2000s, we were welcomed. It was all about economic growth, everything else.
When I was walking around Beijing the last time, it was almost like the way we used to look at Russians in the old Soviet Union. I just felt like people were looking at me completely different and not in a necessarily friendly way.
So it is interesting how much the world has changed and how the paths that we expected things to go down did not manifest itself. Yeah, John, on that point, I can relate to it.
One of the ironies about my own trajectory is I grew up loving Russian history and Russian literature and actually spent time in college living in Russia. And I've had friends there and felt very comfortable living there.
I never felt threatened. I myself now am sanctioned by the Russian government.
So similar to you, I can never travel there, at least not for a very long time. So it's remarkable how much can change in a short period of time.
Yeah. It's unfortunate because when my sister was living there and she was fluent in Russian, she used to always just talk about how beautiful the country was, how wonderful and warm the people were.
And it's one of those things that the more we should focus on the commonalities, we would understand that our differences are just so slight in the big scheme of things. But well, let's go on to this.
You tell through the book, this story through the people who crafted and implemented these economic tools, you call them the Mavericks. I wanted to ask, who was the most surprising figure that you encountered? And along with that, did any of these people struggle with the ethical implications of their work? I think the most remarkable figure in my book is a person by the name of Stuart Levy.
And he's really the founding father of American modern financial warfare. The reason I think he's such an interesting guy is if you look at his trajectory, he was a young lawyer at the Justice Department on 9-11.
He was working on immigration law. He had nothing to do with national security.
And almost by accident, he becomes the head of this new division of the Treasury Department in 2004 called the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. And this office is really created to try to fight terrorist financing to stop Al Qaeda from getting money.
Levy takes the job in the summer of 2004, right before Bush and Kerry are running in that election. And he basically takes it as a flyer on a startup because he's like, Bush might even might lose reelections, but at least I'll do this new job for a few months and see how it goes.
And throughout that experience, Levy finds that even though he doesn't have a huge experience in national security, that his knowledge of how companies and how businesses, how CEOs view regulatory and reputational risk could be used as a weapon to basically isolate America's adversaries. So historically, if you wanted to get other countries on board for something like sanctions, you would send out diplomats to talk to their foreign ministry and try to negotiate sanctions like a diplomatic agreement.
What Levy realized is he could take declassified intelligence that showed how Iran was using the international financial system to support its nuclear program, support terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, go to bank CEOs in places like Frankfurt or London or Hong Kong or Dubai, and basically persuade them not to do business with Iran for fear of that information becoming public and them suffering the reputational harm. Of course, he also had a pretty powerful weapon in his back pocket, which was being able to cut off these banks from access to the US dollar, which for any sort of global bank is effectively a death sentence.
I think Levy did his sort of diplomacy with CEOs in the most gentlemanly way possible, but he did have a pretty powerful card to play if he had to. I think the thing that's also remarkable about Levy is that he winds up being so successful at what he does that Barack Obama retains him in that role.
And he's one of, I think, only two senior officials in the Bush administration who are kept on by Obama. The other is Bob Gates, the former Secretary of Defense.
And Levy, I think, would have been an amazing character in my story, even if his career had ended there when he left the Treasury Department in 2011. But he keeps playing.
He keeps coming back. He winds up becoming the chief legal officer of HSBC, which is the largest bank in the United Kingdom, and winds up playing a really important role uncovering the plot that Huawei had used to evade U.S.
sanctions that winds up getting Huawei's CFO arrested in a very famous way. And Huawei ultimately cut off from American technology, which is the starting shot of what has now become the US-China tech war.
And then even later in the story, he becomes the CEO of the Diem Association, which was the Facebook-led cryptocurrency project that had previously been called Libra, that is couched as this way to create an alternative to the dollar that's even more effective. The thing that's remarkable about Levy is he's playing this almost zealot-like role in the age of economic warfare, both inside the U.S.
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Sign up for Greenlight Infinity at greenlight.com slash podcast. Yeah, I really loved your sections that focused on him because for those who aren't aware, his insights have been so profound and have shaped so much of where we are today.
So I'm really glad that you brought him up and used it

as the example, because if not, I was going to ask you about him anyhow. Well, John, I'm realizing I also didn't answer the second part of your question, which is about ethical dilemmas, because I do think that this is something that you always have to be cognizant about when you're thinking about economic warfare.
A lot of the reasons that people like Stuart Levy become interested in this is because it's a non-military way to exert leverage, right?

It's a way to potentially advance American goals without costing American lives or the lives of people in other countries. At the same time, throughout history, if you have really significant economic embargoes on foreign countries, it can cause humanitarian harm.
And generally speaking, sanctions affect civilian populations more than they affect foreign leaders. And you can't be in this line of work without thinking about the ethical dilemmas and thinking about the harm that you may be imposing.
And I think what most people would say, I'm sure Stuart Levy, where he on this podcast with us would agree with me, is it creates a high threshold for when you want to use these weapons. And even though they're relatively easy to deploy, you're signing documents in Washington instead of sending sailors and airmen and Marines into combat, you have to be thoughtful and only do it when there's a real serious national interest at stake.
And I think with Levy and the campaign against Iran, there was in that you had an adversary of of the United States who had finance and bankrolled and supported terrorist groups around the world that had killed Americans who was actively pursuing nuclear weapons. So I do think Levy was justified.
So just early days into the Trump administration right now, but one of the things that we're already seeing is that the treasury is going to play a major role over the next four years. And I wanted to get into this discussion of coming out of World War II, the US became the gold standard for the world.
In fact, we had a call where not only did we take Germany's gold, but we got the gold from a number of our economic partners in the war. And then under the Nixon administration, we ended up shifting from the gold standard to the fiat standard that we're on today, which kind of changed everything.
And so the central bank and the treasury started to play this profound role. And that role has lasted now for decades, where the US has had the upper hand.
But now, we're starting to see the threat that China could bring by creating an alternative economic system and neutralize America's dominance. I was hoping you could touch on this.
And did I get the path correct? You did. Yeah.
And I think one of the ironies that I draw in the book is this really pivotal moment in 1971 when Richard Nixon unilaterally takes the US off the gold standard and says, you know what, the gold is no longer redeemable for $35 an ounce. It's seen at the time as like the end of American economic dominance.
And the dollar is dead. It's like the end of hegemony in a way.
And of course, we look in retrospect, this is just the beginning of dollar dominance because what winds up happening is when the dollar becomes untethered to gold and when you have the capital controls that had been so important for the Bretton Woods system breakdown, we have a global economy that becomes almost entirely dollarized. So you get to a point where even if it's two countries trading with each other, if it's India and Saudi Arabia trading with each other, they're almost certainly clearing that transaction in US dollars, not in their home currency.
And that's something that is enabled by the Nixon shock and by the fiat standard that you mentioned, John. I think what's happening now is you do see a very significant challenge to American economic dominance by China.
China is GDP term. So in terms of just the size of its economy, it is the closest we've ever had a peer competitor be in terms of being almost as big as the US economy, about 70, 75% as large as the US economy.
China, theoretically, you would think, could have a currency that competed directly with the dollar. After all, China is the world's leading or is a leading trading partner for 120 of the world's countries.
So about two thirds of every country of all the world's countries say count China as their top trading partner. So you'd think that if they're buying so much from China, Chinese companies could say, OK, we'll just pay us in our own currency.
The problem is that the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, wants to keep a really tight control on the way money flows in and out of China. They don't allow you to bring money across borders.
They have very strict capital controls. They don't have liquid financial markets like we have in the United States.
And so I think that the CP's authoritarian control has really been the main impediment to the RMB. The thing I worry about is if we get to the point where we overly politicize the dollar, not just through things like sanctions, but let's say if the Fed's independence were undermined, or if the rule of law in the US were jeopardized, I think over time, you would see the RMB be more of a credible threat to the dollar.
So I think it's not just dependent on China's actions and are they willing to liberalize their financial sector, but also US actions, which are we willing to do the things that are necessary to be a responsible steward of the international financial system. So I want to go back to sanctions, because sanctions have been described as a weapon that fires in both directions.
Given the major economic sanctions on Russia have also disrupted global energy markets, at what point do you think the costs start outweighing the benefits? Yeah. Look, I think that I mentioned earlier that a big factor that has led to the rise of economic warfare and U.S.
foreign policy was the fact that military force became politically toxic after Afghanistan and Iraq. I think what we've seen is when we had sanctions on Iran, for instance, there was really no blowback at home because we didn't have any trade with Iran.
and Iran's, it's not a small country. It's got 80 million people and they got some of the world's largest

oil and gas reserves, but not so big that they're really going to affect our livelihood at home. With Russia, that was a Rubicon that was crossed in 2014 when we started doing sanctions on Russia because they were a big economy, the world's largest exporter of fossil fuels.
And there was real risk of economic blowback both in Europe and the United States. And I think because of that risk of blowback, the sanctions were crafted in a relatively modest and mild way, which I think constrained the blowback, but at the same time also constrained the impact.
And in some ways, you may have emboldened Putin to do things like the 2022 invasion that he did after eight

years after the original annexation of Crimea. Then of course, John, when you talk about China, which is every year, one of our top three trading partners, you've got 600 billion plus of bilateral trade with the Chinese every year.
You're really talking about possibly endangering people's livelihoods in the United States where you'd have an unconstrained economic war with China. And so I think that so far, the US government has been pretty cautious about deploying really aggressive economic weapons against China or Russia.
And even with Russia, there's been, I think, maybe too much caution, frankly, when it comes to the oil sector in particular. But look, I think if we keep on this secular trend that I mentioned earlier, eventually, we're going to to really aggressive stuff with the Chinese and the Russians.
And I think American people will feel it and we'll see if there's support for those types of actions at that time. As I have looked at previous wars and what kind of the major indicator of America's resolve to fight in them, it always comes into the populace of the American people,

as you're just bringing up. That's how we really did a nosedive in Vietnam.
It happened again in the war on terror. And it's something that you, as you just brought up, you really have to watch.
and we've recently seen over the past few weeks that China has entered the AI arms race in a big way, taking on chat GPT. And for a long time, the US has been targeting China's semiconductor industry with sanctions aiming to slow its AI, as well as some of its military technological advances.

Looking at what they have just done, how would you rate the effectiveness of the strategy? And what does it tell us about the future of this tech-driven economic warfare we find ourselves in with China? I'm glad you brought this up because just to loop back to the very beginning of our conversation about choke points. So I think the dollar and the US financial system is the most potent choke point in the global economy today that Washington controls.
The second most potent, at least that we've thought, is the technology that goes into advanced microchips. This is manufacturing equipment from places like firms like Applied Materials and Lam Research, or EUV machines from the Dutch company ASML.
And the theory had been that without access to those tools, China would always stay very far behind the US in semiconductors. And as a result, without that computing power, they'd never be able to match the leading US AI labs in terms of how sophisticated their models are.
What happened a few weeks ago, as you mentioned, is we saw a model out of China by a company called DeepSeek, a relatively small company that seems to be at least in the same ballpark as the open AI models and anthropic models. Probably not quite as good, but in the same ballpark.
And they did have access to some NVIDIA, quite a few NVIDIA chips, high-end chips, because they bought these chips before the export controls went into effect, but certainly not as many, not to the same magnitude that the US labs have. So there's a question, does this mean that the export controls are counterproductive because they've incentivized China to create basically a different way to advance through algorithmic innovation as opposed to hardware innovation? I think the answer to that is certainly this incentive has been created.
But you got to ask yourself, would DeepSeek's model be worse if they had unfettered access to NVIDIA chips? No, it would be a lot better, right? My own takeaway, and frankly, it's the takeaway of Dario Amodai, the CEO of Anthropic, who's come out very powerfully in favor of more export controls, is that it's not the case that these export controls are going to keep us 10 years ahead of China, but they will give us a significant unfair advantage that if the American people use our ingenuity, use our entrepreneurial spirit, we should be able to keep a lead of a year or two over China. That doesn't guarantee anything, right? They still could leapfrog us through other means, but the idea that these export controls were counterproductive, I'm not so convinced of, But at the same time, I don't think they're a magic bullet.

And it's not the only thing that we can rely on if we want to win the AI race with China. So I want to stay on this China theme for a second and go back to Afghanistan.
One of the biggest dilemmas I have for us leaving Afghanistan is it was one of the most plentiful countries in the world for rare earth minerals. And we basically allowed China to replace us there.
And there's been a lot of speculation that China will respond to the US economic warfare by cutting off exports like these rare earth minerals, solar panel components, battery components that we need. By weaponizing its own supply chain dominance, what would the consequences be for the US and the countries in Europe? I'm really glad you brought this up because there's something I see in the media that I always find to be illogical.
So take a chance now to correct it, which is you hear of Trump imposing new tariffs on China and everyone's like, okay, well, maybe China retaliate with tariffs. And actually Trump himself has said that because the US runs trade deficits, we import more from a place like China than we export,

that trade wars are, quote, good and easy to win because we can always tariff more of their imports than they can tariff on us because we import more from China than China imports from the US. My own view, and frankly, what has been borne out in terms of China's retaliation against Trump's tariffs, is that you don't have to retaliate symmetrically.
You can retaliate asymmetrically. And so it's not just tariffs that China is putting on the US.
It's also putting on export controls and banning the export of things like gallium and germanium and antimony, which are really important minerals, and most recently tungsten, which is a critical military additive to the US. You mentioned finished goods like batteries in November of last year, November of 2024.
China cut off the leading US drone company, Skydio, from battery supplies, and the company fell into crisis. All of a sudden, they had to ration batteries.
They said each drone could only have one battery, which of course isn't great if you're relying on a drone to fly extended missions in a place like Ukraine. And the Ukrainian military does rely on Skydio drones to collect battlefield intelligence and document war crimes.
And this just shows that China does have significant power to impose export controls, to withhold important goods that they produce to the United States and other countries. And I think what the imperative is for the United States is economic warfare is not just an offensive game.
There's also defense. And the way you play defense is through things like industrial policy, the CHIPS Act, building our own domestic manufacturing capability in chips, the Inflation Reduction Act, building our own domestic production capacity in clean energy technologies like batteries, rare earth facilities in the US.
We need to do these things. But I also think it's not just autarky that we can rely on.
We can't make everything in the US. And so we need to strengthen supply chain partnerships with our close allies, with the Europeans, with the Japanese, with our North American neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and build secure supply chains that are still internationalized.
They're not only in the US, but don't rely on China. It's going to be a very interesting next few years.
I'm just trying to take in everything that you're talking about, because what you're saying are the same things that are going through my mind on a weekly basis. So I want to make an interesting metaphor for you.
I used to be a senior executive at Dell. And for those who aren't familiar with how Dell has been organized over the years, they did this kind of accordion effect where they would globalize and then localize, globalize and then localize, meaning they would have global leaders over different areas like the consumer business.
And then they would switch to in-country leaders instead where that regional leader was running all practices for Asia PAC, and then they'd switch back. And it created these ripple effects that as a person in technology, I saw because we had this spaghetti architecture.
And at the time I got there, 8,000 plus systems that were all doing repetitive things across this infrastructure. So a whole bunch of spend and wastefulness that the company no longer needed.
But the world is doing this as well. And it's interesting because when I was there, we had a number of different presidents over these business units.
And when I was there, they had switched back to you had a person over consumer a person over small medium business a person over public a person over large enterprise a person over services a person over software but the way that michael would lead is all of them were in competition and so where i'm going with this is it causes these fractures within Dell, which really became economic fractures because all these presidents were competing against each other and their behaviors started to form economic blocks. And I thought I'd introduce this whole topic using this analogy because with every major power weaponizing its economy, are we heading towards a future where the global economy fractures and competing economic blocks like I saw at Dell? Well, I think your personal experience is actually, I think, relevant because I think we are seeing a similar phenomenon play out in the global economy.
The way I view it, John, is I think we really have three possible futures. And I'll handicap our odds of which one is most likely versus least.
So one is maybe we return the unfettered globalization of the 1990s, where we feel like we can have free and open trade with the Chinas and Russias of the world, and it doesn't endanger our national security. I don't think this is particularly likely, frankly, because I think we have the great power competition trend I don't see abating anytime soon.
And so then there are two more likely features, and honestly, I'm not sure which one we're going down. One is something similar to what you mentioned, where we go into a global economy defined by blocks.
But maybe there's only two major blocks. One, that's the US and other democratic allies like the European Union, like Japan, South Korea, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico.
And we have a lot less trade with the Chinas and Russias in the world, but maybe even more trade and more integration with our allies. This is a notion that some people have called friend-shoring, where we're not on-shoring production, but we're friend-shoring production.
Then the third possible future is one I think that sounds a little bit more similar to what you experienced at Dell, which is just a more chaotic breakdown of the global economy, where every single country is in it for themselves. We don't have any long-term trusted economic relationships.
And what the incentive is then for a US company is to try to onshore everything, basically to try to go for autarky, to try to make every single thing in the United States. And I worry about that future for a few reasons.
One is it'd be incredibly costly for the US consumer. I think it'll be costly for businesses and there won't be very much upside to it.
But I think I worry about even more is that in such a scenario in which it's really every country for themselves, what history has shown is if countries can't secure key markets and resources through trade, the temptation of imperialism and conquest rises. And the reason why countries throughout history have tried to seize other countries to take their land is because sometimes they've wanted those mineral resources.
You hear it and echoes have it in some of Trump's comments about Greenland, for instance. And I worry about

that future because that's a future where we're no longer worried about economic warfare, but we're

worried about military warfare, worried about the types of things that our grandparents were

dealing with in the first part of the 20th century. That is a very scary thought.
Sorry, but I'm telling you. It really is.
I've recently been watching some documentaries on World War II and not a place the world wants to go back to because the ramifications at this point with the advances that we've made since then would be catastrophic. Okay.
So I'm going to bring this back to the lens of what we typically talk about here on PassionStruck. I am really doubling down on the power of mattering.
And I discuss a lot on the show about personal psychology. And I've been trying to talk more and more about this concept that I call mattering deserts, places throughout the world and in our communities where people feel unseen and unimportant.
And I want to use this mattering desert as a metaphor, because in an economic sense, do you see the world emerging where entire nations become economic deserts cut off from global trade, isolated and stagnated? Yeah, it's a powerful concept, John. And I do think that's a real risk that we have today.
And even in a place like Iran, where I think there has been a justifiable use of economic warfare against Iran, you see a lot of hopelessness in the population. The regime in Iran basically has no legitimacy, no support, but they're willing to use for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, to basically squash any protest or any democratic change.
I think you're seeing Russia move in that direction. And I think that one of the tragic side effects of economic wars is that even when they're justified, you wind up strengthening oftentimes the role of the authoritarian leader and weakening the role of everyday people.
And so I do think you're creating political apathy in some of these countries and economic hardship. The other thing though, John, that I want to mention, and this ties back to the somewhat frightening future I laid out a few minutes ago, is in this world where every country is for themselves, the only countries that matter are the great powers, right? It's really Washington and Beijing and Moscow are setting the terms for everybody else and everybody else is a bystander.
And that's something I really worry about. I worry about that today with respect to Ukraine, a country that has been invaded, that has seen untold atrocities committed against them, their people.
And there's a real concern, I think, that the Ukrainian people have now that a peace deal might be struck above their heads between Moscow and Washington. I personally don't, I'm not quite yet as worried, I think, as the Ukrainian people are, but that's easy for me to say.
I live in the United States. I'm not there.
But that's a fear, a fear that you could have if you have this chaotic breakdown of the global economy where it's only a couple people in the world, the American president, the Chinese president, and the Russian president who set the terms for everybody else. And the rest of us are living in a mattering desert.
I'm going to preface this, that if you don't know the answer to this,

we'll just cut it from the interview. Thank you.
At the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, I remember listening to an economist talk about why Putin was doing this now. And I remember what he was talking about happened to coincide with the populace in Russia.
And similar to other places in the world, we've seen this natural decline in the number of bursts that are happening. And so in Russia, this is more profound than in many countries.
And what this economist was saying is, and Russia are at the very point where they're going to not have the critical mass needed in order to take the actions that they're doing today. And he said that when you look at this from a geopolitical standpoint, and Russia over the centuries, they have been invaded through a series of checkpoints.
And that what Putin is trying to do while he has enough people left to do it is to start closing off these choke points to protect the company's long-term threat for invasion. So my question to you is, do you think that's really playing out? And are they using economic means along with their people to try to close these choke points down? So look, Russia is certainly headed for a significant demographic breakdown.
You've long

seen very low life expectancy, particularly among Russian males, low birth rates. So I do think that

there's something to the fact that Putin perhaps had these imperialistic dreams for Russia,

realized that his best chance of achieving them would be now. And if anything, five,

10 years from now, assuming he's still alive and in power, Russia would be even weaker.

I think there's something to be said about that. And I think it's an important lesson for anyone following geopolitics, which is it's not just rising powers that necessarily act out and take aggressive action.
And in some cases, if you truly believe time is on your side, your incentive is to wait and just allow yourself to overtake everyone else. In some cases, it's actually countries that are declining where their self-perception is that they should be number one, but the reality is pointing in the opposite direction that try to take really drastic means like Russia did.
So I do think that that could have played into Russia's Putin psychology. I also think Putin does view the breakdown of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.
He said that. And so he views Ukraine as a vassal that should be dominated by Moscow.
And I don't think it's limited to Ukraine. I think he has the same perspective on Belarus, which he's effectively occupied.
He has the same perspective on the Baltic states, probably Poland, which is why these countries, the ones that haven't yet been occupied by Russia, are extremely nervous about Russian aggression and doing everything they possibly can, not only to arm themselves against potential Russian invasion, but to make themselves less vulnerable to Russian economic coercion. And a big headline that you may have seen recently, John, is the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, have now fully disconnected themselves from reliance on Russian energy and Russian electricity.
And that's a huge development because these are three countries, small countries that, you know, Russia, even if they didn't invade, Russia didn't invade them, potentially could bring them to heel just for basically turning the lights off and choking off their access to power. And I think that you are seeing this play out, not just through military means, but also economic warfare.
Very interesting. At the beginning, Eddie, you mentioned to me before we came on that, and in the book, you talk about this a lot.
You weave in your personal stories. You have actually been in the room where these decisions are being made.
And I was hoping that maybe you could bring this to light for a listener or viewer. What are the complexities and the decisions that are going on here? Like, how tense do these meetings get? How much are the participants looking at the pros and cons of the decisions that they're making and the unintended consequences.
I'm glad you brought that up because one of my main goals in writing this book, John, was to really demystify economic warfare, make it easy to understand and also show people how this is done, right? There are plenty of books you can read about how generals and admirals are making decisions in wartime, but there are very few books. And frankly, I don't know any other book that really does that for modern economic warfare.
Look, I think that just going back to a concrete example, February 14, when we start seeing Putin's little green men showing up in Crimea, and within two weeks, he annexes the Crimean Peninsula. That's the type of thing where it takes the u.s government completely by surprise and so you have officials scrambled to the situation room trying to figure out what to do and and in some ways it's almost easier to figure out what you don't want to do and in that scenario president obama and really all the top advisors in the obama administration uh realized we didn't want to fight a war with r right? We didn't want to get in a war with a fellow nuclear superpower that could lead to nuclear holocaust.
And so very quickly, it became, okay, well, if not that, what? And oftentimes, as I'm sure you're familiar with, John, just personal psychology, people are very influenced by their own personal experience and what they have recently gone through oftentimes. There's a recency bias.
And at the time, it was right after the US had gotten the interim deal to freeze Iran's nuclear program, about two months after that. And so we're fresh off this incredible success of using sanctions to get Iran to basically stop developing its nuclear program.
So the officials are like, well, these sanctions worked against Iran, maybe we should try them against Russia. And so then you wind up having scrambling to do analysis, try to figure out where's Russia's economy interlinked with American banks, European banks.
If we sanction this company, what's the fallout going to be not only in Russia, but potentially into the European financial system and maybe even into the US financial system. If we sanction this Russian oil company, is that going to lead to a reduction in supply that then spikes prices and winds up hurting Americans at the gas pump?

There's so many different dependencies, so many different interlinkages. And unfortunately,

despite the fact with how frequently we use these tools like sanctions or export controls or tariffs,

we don't have the equivalent of the Pentagon for economic warfare. These are officials scattered across different agencies, the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department, the State Department, who oftentimes have to build these, build basically processes on the fly in an ad hoc way.
And so one of the parting points I make in the book and something I really believe firmly is that we need to create a government that's purpose-built to fight and win economic wars. We are living in this age of economic warfare.
And if America wants to stay on top, we have to take this stuff more seriously. We can't depend on the luck of having a Stuart Levy in the right seat at the right time.
We need to foster trained people in our schools that understand finance, technology, law, all the sort of components you need for economic warfare. I'm going to need to empower them and put them in the right sort of chains of command where they actually can make a difference.
It's almost like years ago when we had the war department and we were actually winning wars. When you have people completely dedicated to one goal, you tend to get the outcome that you want.
And since we shifted from that, we see the ripple effect when we don't. So I think that whole idea is a good calling card.
I might tell my daughter who's in college right now that she should start viewing the world through this lens of economic warfare and what she's studying. So I want to take you, Eddie, just as we close out through a couple different fictional scenarios, just to see, because I think this would be fun for the audience.
I'm going to give you the first one. We talked about AI earlier in the discussion.
Suppose an AI-driven sanctions program is developed capable of instantly detecting and enforcing violations worldwide. Would that make economic warfare more precise and effective, or would it create unforeseen dangers? Certainly would make economic warfare more precise and effective.
I think one of the big challenges about economic warfare is that the actual frontline soldiers

aren't U.S. officials.

They're actually executives, bank CEOs, bank compliance officers.

They are compliance officers at tech companies who are actually taking the regulations that

come out of Washington and Brussels and Tokyo and figuring out how to implement them.

And a big challenge that you might imagine for the U.S. government is tracking all that

information.

How do we know what companies everywhere in the world are doing?

Thank you. figuring out how to implement them.
And a big challenge that you might imagine for the U.S. government is tracking all that information.
How do we know what companies everywhere in the world are doing? I think the U.S. is better at it than any other country is, but there's still a lot that we miss.
There's a ton of economic activity that happens outside of our ability to detect it. Certainly, I think if you had an AI capable sanctions program that was tracking economic activity, you would even have a more fearsome power that would be at the hands of Washington.
So I think the sanctions would be more impactful. Would there be unforeseen consequences? Almost certainly, yes, because there's probably some level of sanctions evasion that occurs, let's say, in developing countries that, in my view, shouldn't even be under sanctions.
We've got plenty of sanctions programs on small countries that I think should be lifted. And I think that if those regimes were implemented incredibly aggressively, I think it would do more

harm than good. Right now, they're not implemented that aggressively because we're limited by

manpower. And most of the people who are working in these agencies in the US government are devoted

to Iran as opposed to some of these legacy legacy sanction programs that no one thinks about. But I think if you had AI doing it, you'd start seeing that the benefits of having sanctions on small countries in Africa and Latin America is probably outweighed by the drawbacks.
Thank you for that. And here's another one.
So we talked about the U.S. and China a lot today.
If the U.S. were to enter a full-scale conflict with China, military, technological, or economic, or a combination of all of them, what would China do first to sever the U.S.
from its global supply chains? Would it be to launch a cyber attack where they go after our energy grids? Would it be something that takes out our technological might? Would it be something that disrupts our military communications? What would it be? So I would look at this through two lenses. I think from a non-kinetic lens, so from a non-military lens, I think the thing that I'm most concerned about, and I cover quite a bit in the book, is the way in which China has its finger on global telecom networks.
And this was really the reason why the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, started trying to bring Huawei down to size because Huawei was very quickly, a Chinese company, quickly dominating global 5G networks. And I think even to this day, there's a lot of our telecom networks that are dependent on Chinese base stations and routers.
And I am concerned about China's ability to shut down our communications in a true break glass conflict scenario. Because of course, what enables us to not just fight wars, but even just do strategic planning is being able to talk to each other.
And if China can stop that from happening, which I think is not completely out of the realm of possibility, it's a real problem for the US. I think the second thing I'd be worried about, this is more in the kinetic realm.
And this takes us back to pre-globalization economic warfare, back when the Athenian Navy would worry about getting cut off from the Bosphorus by a foreign Navy. I worry about a Chinese naval quarantine of Taiwan.
There's a lot of talk about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The thing I think is more likely and frankly just as worrisome is if you have the Chinese Navy encircle the island and basically prevent ships from coming and going, trade ships that are carrying 90% of the world's supply of advanced semiconductors, which I think would very rapidly sow chaos, not just on the US economy, but definitely on the US economy quite a bit.
And then here's the last scenario. So digital currencies are the talk from everyone.
And right now I see it playing out where you've got the US in the race to create a digital currency that could be like the central bank. You've got China trying to do the same thing.
You've got Bitcoin in the mix. So let's imagine in a scenario where China is the first to create a worldwide digital currency that rivals the US dollar.
What would that mean for America's stability to use financial sanctions as a weapon in the future? It would dramatically undermine American financial power. And this is something I bring up in the book too, because I'm very worried about it because in some ways in the US, we've come to rest on our laurels because we have had this dollar dominance now for however long, 70 plus years.
But in digital currency, as you say, John, China's got the lead. The digital RMB, which is our central bank digital currency, is the world's leading state-backed digital currency.
And we don't even have a competitor in the US. We don't have a digital dollar.
It's been talked about, but it's never been advanced. And Trump himself has been actually quite hostile to the idea.
So I'm not confident that's going to happen anytime soon, unless he changes his mind. But yes, I think in a scenario in which you had a digital RMB that was even more convenient and stable for clearing international transactions than the dollar, it's not necessarily that it would replace the dollar and we'd move it to an RMB standard.
It's just that in the scenario we just talked about where the US and China are at war, very quickly, China would be able to make itself resilient to American financial sanctions. And I think it'd be able to persuade many of its trading partners to move over to the digital RMB.
Because as I mentioned earlier, you got two thirds of the world's countries who have China as their top trading partner.

So they got to figure out a way to pay China.

And if they can't do it through dollars, I think the digital RMB will become quite appealing. That is the scenario that I am most worried about because I think it's the one that could become the most likely and we're not prepared for it.
Okay, so my final question is, it's 2040

and you're writing an updated edition of choke points, which has become a New York times bestseller selling millions of copies. What will be the biggest economic weapon of that era? What new battlefield do you think will have emerged? Oh, wow.
That's a great question. Before I answer it, I will say one thing, which is that there's nothing immutable about these economic choke points, right? They come and go.
Some choke points that exist today that seem all powerful tomorrow might be not such a big lever that states can use, right? And I think a classic example here is the US believed that the global oil tanker fleet would be a significant choke point that it could use against Russia, which it was, but Russia found ways to evade it over time by buying up its own oil tankers. So what are we going to be talking about in 2040? I think almost certainly we're going to be talking about digital currencies as a significant choke point.
And just to tie this back to my last answer, we've seen how powerful financial networks can be in particular for economic warfare. And if it's a Chinese digital currency, that is the kingpin digital currency of the year 2040, we might not be calling the second edition American power in the age of economic warfare.
We might be calling it Chinese power in the age of economic warfare. That's the thing that keeps me up at night.
Eddie, last question. Where's the best place for people to learn more about you? Oh, man.
Well, I'm very blessed to be a senior research scholar at Columbia University's School of International Public Affairs and Center on Global Energy Policy. So you can check me out at the Columbia website.
You can also follow me on Twitter at Edward Fishman. And usually I post my articles there, but otherwise, hope to see you guys at one of my book talks around the country in the next few months.
And I'm just going to show it one more time. Checkpoints by Edward Fishman.
And what we discussed today is really just a tip of the iceberg of what Eddie goes into in this book. If you're interested in this topic, I highly encourage you to buy a copy.
Eddie, thank you so much for joining us. It was such an enlightening conversation and an honor to have you.
John, thanks so much. An honor to be on the show as well.
And that's a wrap on this eye-opening conversation with Edward Fishman. His insights challenge us to rethink how power is wielded in the modern world, how economic warfare is shaping global conflicts, and why the real battles of the 21st century may not be fought with weapons, but with financial leverage, supply chains, and sanctions.
As we close out today's episode, take a moment to reflect, how do economic decisions at the highest levels impact your daily life, whether it's the cost of goods, job opportunities, or financial security? Are we moving toward a world of greater stability through economic deterrence, or are we on the edge of a new kind of global conflict? The conversations we have here on PassionStruck are meant to challenge perspectives and help you make more intentional decisions, whether in your careers, relationships, or understanding of the world around you. If you found today's discussion valuable, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review.
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It could spark an entirely new way of thinking. All resources discussed today, including Edward Fishman's book, Choke Points, are linked in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
If you'd like to watch the full video version, head over to my YouTube channel at John R. Miles.
And don't forget to subscribe and share with others who are passionate about growth and insight. I love bringing these topics into organizations and teams through my speaking engagements.
If today's episode got you thinking about the broader implications of leadership, resilience, and strategic decision-making, visit johnrmiles.com slash speaking to learn more about how we can work together. And coming up next on PassionStruck, we shift gears to a deeply personal and psychological conversation on how we see ourselves, our aspirations, and our perfectionism.
In our next episode, I sit down with Sandra Matts, professor at Columbia Business School, who studies how personality, psychology, and data-driven insights shape the world we live in. Her work explores how our digital footprints, our online behaviors, purchases, and interactions are being used to predict everything from our happiness to our spending habits.
We'll dive into how our psychological traits influence our success and fulfillment and why understanding your own personality data can help you lead work and live more effectively. You won't want to miss this eye-opening conversation.
Companies now actually have to step it up, right? So they have to say, well, if I want to get your data, I better make sure that I show you how my product is much, much better when you're giving me access to your personal information than when you're not. And you can think of it as like YouTube, right? So YouTube has this option where they're not using your history and your like what you've looked for, searched for before, what you've watched before.
And you can actually see the value decrease. So there's, you can see, I was like, every time you have to find something new, you could, doesn't remember anything.
But if your privacy is protected by design, now companies really have to live up to that expectation. So collectively, you can actually ask for a lot more when it comes to the design of products and services.
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