Chokepoints

Fishman, a former State Department sanctions official, builds his account around four campaigns — Iran's pre-2015 nuclear sanctions, post-2014 Russia measures, the Huawei-era tech restrictions on China, and the sweeping post-2022 Russia sanctions — to argue that America's real leverage now runs through financial and technological infrastructure like SWIFT and chip fabrication rather than through military power. It's written with a practitioner's granular knowledge of how these tools were actually built and deployed, which is its main strength. Its limitation, which reviewers have been consistent about, is that it reads as a case for the practice more than a full accounting of it: the Russia case shows sanctions wound without delivering a knockout blow, a limit Fishman names but doesn't fully interrogate, and civilian costs get comparatively little space.