How the Dollar Became a Weapon
Shownotes
The US dollar is completely dominant all around the world. It shows up in 90% of all foreign exchange transactions every day. Pretty much anywhere in the world, you can whip out a dollar and use it. Central banks around the globe hold dollars in reserve. And for the past few decades, US government officials have started to take advantage of that global dominance in a new way: using the dollar itself as a weapon of diplomacy, of economic warfare.
Edward Fishman was one such official. He worked at Treasury and the State Department as they were pioneering these novel tactics, and last year, he wrote a book about it, called “Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.” In this week’s conversation, we go deep on peer-pressuring banks and sliding manila envelopes across tables, how abstract chokepoints stack up against physical ones, and what this new diplomatic strategy means for a world at war.
This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.