For decades, international policymakers largely ignored global chokepoints, choosing instead to celebrate the boundless efficiencies of a tightly integrated world economy. Today, however, those same leaders have trouble seeing anything else.
Across the globe, governments are increasingly obsessed with identifying, securing, and weaponizing the vital nodes of international commerce. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration routinely warns allies against falling into deep economic dependence on China, while simultaneously searching for ways to exploit those same allies’ reliance on the United States—leveraging American markets, advanced technologies, the global financial system, and a robust security umbrella.
Meanwhile, Beijing accuses Washington of blatant economic coercion while quietly leveraging its own dominance over critical mineral and technology supply chains to pressure both the United States and Europe. In Europe, policymakers continuously explore ways to build the euro into a viable alternative global currency capable of evading the dollar’s iron grip. Even smaller international players have joined the fray; Iran, for instance, frequently attempts to weaponize its geographical control over the Strait of Hormuz to place a stranglehold on the global oil trade.
This sweeping obsession with wielding and countering chokepoint power may feel sudden, but it has evolved organically over the last quarter-century as a direct byproduct of globalization itself. As national economies integrated, chokepoints naturally proliferated. Manufacturers extended complex supply chains across multiple borders, commercial banks routed billions in transactions through the U.S. dollar system to minimize costs and administrative delays, and digital services took advantage of economies of scale, leading global markets to become dominated by just a handful of powerful platforms.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States combined its traditional advocacy for free markets with an increasingly ambitious effort to exploit its dominant position within these vital networks. Washington began surveilling global communications and using its sweeping influence over international banking networks to cut off financial flows to its adversaries. Yet, even as these practices expanded, most mainstream politicians and business leaders continued to focus almost exclusively on globalization’s short-term economic efficiencies.
Major shifts occurred during Trump’s first term in office, which forced world leaders to pay closer attention to the inherent vulnerabilities of global chokepoints. Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic heightened widespread national fears regarding external dependencies. By the time Trump returned to a second administration, Beijing had learned that a reliable way to counter American pressure was to squeeze a critical chokepoint. The continuous, hubristic erosion of basic norms of constraint by the United States ultimately encouraged smaller actors, such as Iran, to explore aggressive options they had never previously dared to exploit.
Compared to an excessively rosy vision of globalization that prioritized the efficiencies of mutual interdependence, viewing the world economy as a fragile network of chokepoints that can either be turned to one’s advantage or used as a weapon may currently seem savvy. However, this chokepoint-centric worldview harbors a deadly blind spot. It is driving policymakers to focus heavily on raw capabilities rather than overarching strategy—fixating obsessively on what leverage they hold, and what leverage others hold over them, while completely failing to consider the chaotic outcome when numerous countries build up their chokepoint power simultaneously.
The resulting dynamic is a familiar yet perilous trap: the security dilemma, wherein one country’s defensive efforts to secure itself make rival nations feel threatened, prompting them to respond in kind and leaving every participant fundamentally less safe. The more individual states strengthen their control over chokepoints or attempt to insulate themselves from potential coercion, the more they convince rivals that their own economic security has been actively undermined, thereby provoking immediate retaliation.
As economic scholars such as David Bulman and Matt Ferchen have noted, each country’s individual defensive actions contribute directly to the construction of a collective trap. Efforts by the United States to hamstring Chinese technology firms, for example, prompted Beijing to accelerate its own domestic technological development. That rapid domestic progress subsequently spurred renewed American fears of Chinese technological domination, creating a self-perpetuating, escalating spiral. Every single attempt by either side to become safer ultimately makes the other feel less secure, driving further escalation.
Escaping this chokepoint trap is extraordinarily difficult precisely because it is collective in nature. Any government that exercises unilateral restraint risks becoming an immediate victim. Although the chokepoint trap strongly resembles the traditional security dilemma, during the Cold War the measures that ultimately contained runaway cycles of military provocation were implemented only after the terrifying threat of the Cuban missile crisis forced leaders to pay attention.
An obsessive focus on chokepoints might lead straight to a collective disaster, yet it remains remarkably hard for sovereign states to jump off the escalating escalator, balance making credible threats with offering credible assurances, and seek genuine collective understandings. The most probable outcome is a fragmented global landscape in which governments and private economic actors alike face heightened volatility, alongside the escalating risk of severe economic shocks, cascading disruptions, and even open warfare.
One Way Ratchet
In a traditional security dilemma, one country’s purely defensive move can easily appear offensive to a neighbor. A state may seek peaceful relations while worrying that a belligerent leader could someday come to power next door. To hedge against that small but real risk, it might invest in a new weapons system or modestly increase the size of its army. The neighbor naturally becomes alarmed, wondering if the buildup is preparation for an invasion, and responds by ramping up its own defense spending. This triggers a mutual escalatory spiral.
While governments sometimes harbor genuinely belligerent intentions, even states that genuinely want peace can end up mutually distrustful and heavily armed. In such an atmosphere of suspicion, innocent mistakes are routinely misinterpreted. In a classic 1978 essay on the security dilemma, political scientist Robert Jervis argued that countries can mitigate the risk of misinterpretation by ensuring their security-enhancing acts are obviously defensive rather than offensive—such as investing in fortifications deep within their own territory rather than deploying troops to forward bases. Yet even passive defenses can heighten tensions if rivals fear that enhanced protection makes aggression less risky.
In later writings, Jervis suggested that similar ambiguities could undermine economic and technological security. However, economic warfare is even more prone to unintended escalation than traditional military security. Unlike military investments, economic policies are exceptionally difficult to classify as purely offensive or defensive. When China builds up its semiconductor manufacturing sector, is it merely protecting its domestic economy against external shocks, or is it augmenting its capacity for future coercion?
Industrial policies are frequently enacted for defensible reasons, such as establishing resilience against geopolitical disruptions. Yet if those policies successfully generate economies of scale, other states will reasonably fear that industrial dominance can easily be converted into coercive tools.
Economic security officials generally show more interest in building national capacity than in exercising restraint. Traditional economic policymakers, by contrast, are accustomed to soothing domestic markets rather than assuaging the concerns of foreign competitors or adversaries. Defense bureaucracies maintain strong command-and-control structures for a reason, as ill-disciplined communications can have disastrous consequences. Economic policy institutions, including central banks and commerce departments, are rarely structured to speak with a single voice.
Many economic agencies feature weak internal coordination, with significant authority delegated to local-level investment and trade bureaus. Central banks, for instance, have autonomy that is deliberately protected by law. While military units on discrete missions cannot act without explicit authorization, most economic agencies enjoy wide freedom to act independently. As recent disagreements between the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve over bond yields demonstrate, standard bureaucratic infighting can easily shade into visible public conflict.
When governments actively pursue chokepoint warfare, these institutional ambiguities become vastly more dangerous. In September 2025, following a series of high-level bilateral economic negotiations between top U.S. and Chinese officials aimed at stabilizing relations, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security enacted the "affiliates rule." This regulation expanded export controls to cover additional subsidiaries owned by entities listed on two U.S. government watch lists.
While the bureau publicly described the measure as a routine attempt to close an administrative loophole and lighten enforcement burdens—a rule that has since been suspended—the timing confused outside observers. They struggled to discern whether the Commerce Department was merely tightening enforcement as part of an ongoing bureaucratic process or whether Washington was deliberately engaging in "maximum pressure" tactics right between rounds of formal bilateral talks.
Interpreting the intentions of autocracies is even more difficult, as policymakers in such regimes are heavily insulated from public scrutiny. For instance, even after China promised to relax restrictions on rare-earth mineral and magnet exports in July 2025, companies applying for export licenses experienced unexplained, lengthy delays. It remained unclear whether Beijing was deliberately signaling its capacity to control critical supply chains or simply struggling to process applications efficiently through a newly established export-control bureaucracy.
Governments engaging in economic warfare often intentionally write or enforce regulations with deliberate ambiguity to prompt private actors to overcomply. This behavior makes outsiders far more likely to interpret hapless bureaucratic mistakes, administrative delays, and unintentional overreach as malign, calculated plots. Such misinterpretations deepen mistrust among great powers that are already inclined to overrate the likelihood of deliberate threats.
Conversely, national leaders are frequently overly optimistic about their ability to surgically inflict economic pain on target countries. Commerce cannot be steered with the precision of a guided drone targeting a weapons factory. Even targeted measures, such as placing specific firms on export-control lists, can prove ineffective when controlled goods ultimately end up in the hands of subsidiaries or clandestine intermediaries. Broad attempts to close loopholes can easily overreach, placing thousands of firms with complex ownership structures in the crosshairs of the economic security state.
In October 2025, China expanded its own rare-earth export controls in direct retaliation against the U.S. affiliates rule and broader American efforts to restrict Chinese firms from accessing advanced U.S. technologies. Had those measures not been suspended the following month, they would have severely disrupted production chains throughout Europe and Asia, as well as in the United States. Officials who dream of an optimized form of chokepoint warfare—firing an economic sniper rifle at judiciously selected targets—regularly discover they are instead wielding a blunderbuss whose pellets fly in all directions, with collateral damage fueling further retaliatory spirals.
All Choked Up
The more individual nations move to control key chokepoints, the more other countries worry about how those bottlenecks might be weaponized, driving them to leverage their own choke points in response. The resulting global landscape is bristling with chokepoints and defensive barriers, yet every major power continues to feel entirely insecure. Even the most ordinary forms of mutual economic dependence begin to look like existential security risks. In a world where everything is connected, nearly everything can be classified as a chokepoint; a piece of legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2025 and the House in 2026, for example, identifies everyday smart ovens and clothes dryers as potential national security threats.
Historically effective methods for resolving trade disputes routinely fail in the realm of chokepoint warfare. In traditional tariff wars, governments often attempt to match like with like, responding to a tariff on foreign butter with a counter-tariff on eggs. Maintaining such proportionality becomes nearly impossible when economic security risks are diverse, when different chokepoints confer vastly different types of leverage, and when countries seeking retaliation must target entirely different economic networks.
In April 2025, when the United States threatened China with sweeping tariffs and tightened export controls on semiconductors, Beijing could not retaliate with an equivalent restriction on American semiconductors because it did not control that specific chokepoint. Instead, it responded by leveraging its advantage over a different bottleneck: rare-earth minerals. When countries weaponize entirely different chokepoints sitting at the center of complex global supply chains, there is no straightforward way to judge whether a reaction matches the economic magnitude of the original act. Any notion of a simple escalation ladder that adversaries can climb up and down becomes a fantasy.
Rapid and unpredictable technological change makes this dynamic significantly more dangerous. As Jervis warned, countries persistently worry that technological innovation will create enduring advantages for their adversaries. Such anxieties worsen the chokepoint trap, inspiring nations to impede their rivals’ progress while racing to build domestic autonomy. The Biden administration, anticipating that artificial intelligence might swiftly accelerate military and civilian capabilities, sought to impede Chinese AI development by restricting access to specialized semiconductors.
Although U.S. officials stressed their goals were limited—describing their approach as a "small yard, high fence"—Beijing rejected this benign framing, viewing the moves as a direct threat to its long-term national future. China promptly accelerated its own semiconductor development, encouraging domestic companies to wean themselves off U.S. products. Consequently, the United States now retains less influence over Chinese technological development and faces heightened anxiety regarding future Chinese actions.
First Mover
Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States began making systematic use of economic and technological chokepoints, monitoring both adversaries and allies while exploiting the global dominance of the U.S. dollar to investigate and sanction foreign banks and companies. American officials increasingly viewed the global economy’s deep interconnectedness as a tool to be manipulated for deterrence or to strongarm allies into compliance.
Successive administrations expanded sanctions to squeeze Iran’s economy and force Tehran to negotiate. The first Trump administration introduced novel technological controls to limit Chinese access to advanced semiconductors, establishing the precedent for the Biden administration’s broader efforts to curb Chinese AI capabilities.
Throughout this period, however, American officials paid little attention to the cumulative downside. Financial sanctions were attractive primarily because most of the costs fell on targeted foreigners and those seeking to transact with them. Exploiting chokepoints became a self-perpetuating enterprise with little purpose beyond sustaining itself.
A 2024 analysis by The Washington Post revealed that the United States maintained active sanctions against individuals, properties, or organizations in roughly one-third of all global countries. Bill Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official, told the newspaper that sanctions had become "the most important foreign policy tool in the U.S. arsenal," adding that "nobody in government is sure this whole strategy is even working."
As the United States exploited these chokepoints, it inevitably provoked countermeasures and imitation. Other global powers developed their own chokepoint capabilities with similar lack of caution. China had long used economic pressure to achieve its policy goals, but traditionally threatened access to its domestic market rather than controlling global supply bottlenecks. Two major events altered this playbook. First, the 2013 disclosures by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extraordinary reach of U.S. global information networks. Second, the first Trump administration’s punishing campaigns against Chinese telecommunications giants ZTE and Huawei demonstrated Washington’s absolute willingness to use coercion.
Following these shocks, Chinese technological policy debates began emphasizing concepts such as "information security" and "decoupling." Chinese leader Xi Jinping increasingly stressed that economic development could not be separated from national security. His "dual circulation" strategy sought to reduce dependence on overseas markets while simultaneously lowering China’s exposure to foreign economic pressure. As Beijing grew more conscious of its vulnerability to U.S. technology and finance, it accelerated technological self-reliance and created new government structures mirroring Washington’s targeting mechanisms, including a formal export-control regime and security screenings for inbound and outbound investments.
While China justified these measures as self-defense, it rapidly transitioned from proportionate responses to dramatic counter-escalation. When Trump announced sweeping new tariffs in April 2025, China not only imposed licensing restrictions on rare-earth exports but subsequently suggested its dominance over rare-earth processing gave it regulatory authority over the entire global semiconductor supply chain.
Beijing also barred exports of dual-use goods to U.S. defense contractors and civilian technology firms, sanctioned American companies accused of arms sales or technology cooperation with Taiwan’s military, and launched antitrust investigations against major firms like Google, Nvidia, and DuPont. Although some of these measures were later suspended through negotiations, China repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to strike back against perceived foreign economic coercion.
In another counter-offensive, Beijing began building a "blocking" regime to punish foreign companies complying with other nations’ economic security restrictions. Foreign banks adhering to U.S. law by terminating business with a sanctioned Chinese refinery risk facing lawsuits in Chinese courts. Rules promulgated in late 2025 made it illegal for Chinese firms to provide information or conduct business with six organizations that perform supply chain due diligence, risk assessment, and labor rights promotion, deliberately obstructing the forensics required for global companies to comply with American laws.
Follow the Leader
China has fundamentally reshaped its economic policy around a narrow, defensive view of national security. Much like early American chokepoint exploitation, Beijing’s efforts to fence off large portions of its economy are prompting destabilizing counter-reactions and widespread emulation. Data from the Global Trade Alert, an independent monitor tracking international trade policy changes, shows a dramatic surge in export restrictions. Since 2020, governments have enacted an average of seven times as many export restrictions per year as they did between 2010 and 2019, illustrating how deeply states are entangling themselves in a web of economic and technological conflict.
Within this dynamic, Europe—whose nominal economy is larger than China’s—finds itself perpetually forced to accommodate competing pressures. While Europe’s ability to formulate coherent economic-security strategies and design policy tools is technically advanced compared to Washington or Beijing, it has struggled to translate words into real leverage.
The European Union has introduced powerful anti-coercion instruments, comprehensive economic security strategies, and a Chips Act 2.0 designed to maintain Europe’s position as an indispensable supply chain player. Yet Europe remains deeply dependent on U.S. technology and security guarantees, and its ambitions for economic autonomy often evaporate in the face of risks that Washington might alter its NATO commitments. To date, Europe has not deployed its anti-coercion instruments against the United States, despite repeated provocations from the Trump administration.
At the same time, Europe faces mounting constraints stemming from its economic dependence on China. When the EU imposed countervailing duties on Chinese electric vehicles found to be unfairly subsidized, Beijing quickly targeted vital export sectors in key EU member states. This forced European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to expend considerable political capital to keep Berlin and Madrid aligned behind a common European policy.
In September 2025, when the Dutch government attempted to assert sovereign authority over Nexperia, a Dutch chip manufacturer acquired by a Chinese entity, Beijing prevented the firm from finalizing chip production in China, triggering an immediate supply chain crisis across the European automotive industry. According to a mid-2026 report by Tobias Gehrke, a senior policy analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, persistent Chinese economic threats continue to prevent European capitals from contemplating the comprehensive actions required to reduce their vulnerabilities.
Every European push for strategic autonomy is consistently undermined by expectations that Washington or China will exploit internal EU divisions. Furthermore, core national security decisions remain strictly within the domain of individual member states, preventing the EU from effectively leveraging potential collective chokepoints. While Europe achieved major milestones in uniting to impose sanctions on Russia, enforcement still depends heavily on national governments, leaving the bloc acutely aware of escalation dangers yet largely incapable of avoiding them.
Japan, by contrast, recognized the threat of Chinese economic coercion early and adopted a more tailored approach, successfully balancing strategic autonomy and resilience with control over vital technological chokepoints. Tokyo established a national strategic stockpile of rare-earth minerals to mitigate pressure from Beijing while making itself an indispensable supplier to U.S. military supply chains. Even Japan, however, has occasionally succumbed to chokepoint politics; in 2019, it restricted South Korea’s access to key semiconductor chemicals in response to bilateral disputes over historical wartime grievances.
Smaller and poorer nations are increasingly caught within this escalating spiral. While some have benefited temporarily—such as the Philippines securing millions in U.S. grants during American campaigns to block Huawei from telecommunications infrastructure—most are simply squeezed.
In Myanmar, the Kachin Independence Army sells dysprosium and terbium, vital for industrial magnets, to finance its civil war against the military junta, granting China, as the primary buyer, significant leverage over the local conflict. Greenland, possessing vast natural mineral reserves, has faced repeated economic and geopolitical threats from Washington. Over time, the systemic costs are likely to outweigh any short-term financial benefits for smaller nations desperately seeking sovereign autonomy and prosperity.
No Way Out
Currently, the United States and China are locked in a fragile, short-term stasis. Washington is moderating its most aggressive use of chokepoints out of fear of severe economic blowback, while Beijing currently sees limited utility in direct provocation. However, this stability is expected to be fleeting. Even after political leadership changes in Washington, the United States will almost certainly continue pursuing global technological and energy dominance, while China quietly builds alternative dependencies designed to undermine American coercive power. In a global system where incentives inexorably point toward escalation, fragile stalemates rarely endure.
The major powers with the greatest capacity to shape the international order currently view chokepoints purely as tactical capabilities rather than strategic hazards. As they aggressively build offensive capacities and shore up defensive barriers, they convince themselves they are ensuring national security. Instead, they are miring themselves in an economic chokepoint arms race that leaves everyone fundamentally less secure.
The traditional national security dilemma has officially spilled over into the global economy. A world where economic chokepoints function simultaneously as forts, garrisons, and weapons will inevitably be characterized by perpetual low-level conflict and the ever-present threat of major conflagrations.
To identify broader solutions, some policy analysts look to Cold War history for inspiration, emphasizing the vital importance of de-escalation and mutual restraint. During that era, the catastrophic risk of nuclear war was mitigated through regular diplomatic meetings to establish shared redlines and communication channels during crises. Over time, those talks yielded formal arms control treaties monitored by satellites and verification mechanisms. Similar assurance-based security logic can occasionally protect economic chokepoints from weaponization; Singapore, for instance, has signed supply-chain agreements with Australia and New Zealand, while World Trade Organization members agreed in 2022 to exempt food purchased for humanitarian aid from export restrictions.
However, translating such commitments into a large-scale system of effective communication and mutual restraint remains exceptionally difficult. It required the terrifying proximity of the Cuban missile crisis and the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation to awaken Cold War antagonists to the dangers of individually rational actions producing collectively disastrous outcomes.
Today, as mutual suspicion accelerates, reversing course grows increasingly arduous. The more governments establish specialized bureaucracies dedicated to identifying and controlling economic chokepoints, the more entrenched chokepoint logic becomes as the default lens for routine policymaking. It is no coincidence that Europe, the major power most hesitant to actively weaponize chokepoints, is also the least capable of deploying them effectively.
Instead, the chokepoint trap is likely to tighten further. Just as historical military competition drove states to mirror one another’s armed forces and defense industries, identical institutional mirroring is now occurring in the economic security sphere. China is increasingly adopting American-style bureaucratic tools to weaponize chokepoints against adversaries, while the United States increasingly intervenes in its domestic economy to realign it around national security priorities. The European Union faces a stark choice between managing its own irrelevance or radically reforming its internal governance to keep pace. Smaller powers will emulate major nations while seeking shelter under their respective security umbrellas.
While these shifts pose severe challenges for governments, the consequences for international business will be far worse. Multinational corporations must navigate a labyrinthine, highly unpredictable global economy where payment and information networks are increasingly fragmented, and clashing superpowers demand either active service or complete exclusion.
Multinational enterprises risk becoming unified entities in name only, as individual subsidiaries face conflicting, irreconcilable pressures from host governments. Efficiencies that currently seem permanent, such as the seamlessness of international financial transactions, may well evaporate as governments increasingly equate global financial infrastructure with national vulnerability.
Even more concerning is the risk of unpredictable disasters. The greatest danger posed by the chokepoint trap is not its predictable administrative miseries, but the potential for sudden, catastrophic escalation. It is not difficult to construct realistic scenarios where additional Chinese restrictions on rare-earth magnets degrade American capabilities to rebuild missile stockpiles depleted by regional conflicts. Whether intended by Beijing or not, U.S. leaders could easily interpret such supply disruptions as proof of a pending military offensive elsewhere, sparking a dangerous preemptive urgency in Washington.
Substantial historical precedent exists for such worst-case trajectories. As historian Nicholas Mulder documented in The Economic Weapon, fears of League of Nations sanctions and economic isolation in the 1930s drove Axis powers to aggressively seize territory and resources before it was too late. The modern chokepoint trap is already fraught with peril, and what it ultimately threatens to unleash may prove far worse.
