Policymakers used to ignore chokepoints. Now they have trouble seeing anything else. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration warns allies against dependence on China while it hunts for ways to exploit those allies’ own dependence on the United States—on its market, technologies, financial system, and security umbrella. Beijing, meanwhile, accuses Washington of economic coercion while leveraging its dominance over critical supply chains to press the United States and Europe. Europe hopes to build the euro into an alternative global currency to evade the dollar’s iron grip. Smaller players, too, have gotten into the act, as Iran tries to leverage its control over the Strait of Hormuz to put a stranglehold on the global oil trade.
This obsession with wielding and countering chokepoint power may seem sudden, but it has evolved over the last quarter century as a byproduct of globalization itself. As economies integrated, chokepoints proliferated: manufacturers extended supply chains across borders, banks routed transactions through the U.S. dollar system to minimize costs and delays, digital services took advantage of economies of scale, leading the market to become dominated by a handful of platforms. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the United States combined its advocacy for free markets with an increasingly ambitious effort to exploit its dominant position in these networks, surveilling global communications and using its influence over banks worldwide to cut off financial flows to its adversaries. But even as it did so, most politicians and business leaders continued to focus on globalization’s economic efficiencies.
Moves by Trump in his first term, however, caused world leaders to take more notice of chokepoints. The COVID-19 pandemic heightened countries’ fears of external dependence. Then, during Trump’s second administration, China learned that the best way to stop him is to squeeze a chokepoint. The United States’ hubristic erosion of basic norms of constraint led other countries, such as Iran, to explore options they had never previously dared to exploit.
Compared with an excessively rosy vision of globalization that emphasized the efficiencies of interdependence, it may now seem savvy to view the world economy as a system of chokepoints that countries can either turn to their advantage or see turned against them. But the chokepoint view has its own deadly blind spot. It is leading policymakers to focus on capabilities rather than strategy—to fixate on what leverage they have, and what leverage others have over them, rather than considering what happens when many countries build up their chokepoint power all at once.
The result is a familiar but dangerous dynamic: the security dilemma, in which one country’s efforts to secure itself make others feel threatened and respond in kind, leaving everyone less safe. The more that countries strengthen their control over chokepoints or protect themselves from coercion, the more they can make rivals feel that their own economic security has been undermined and provoke retaliation. As economic scholars such as David Bulman and Matt Ferchen have pointed out, each country’s individual actions contribute to the construction of a collective trap. The United States’ efforts to hamstring Chinese technology firms, for instance, led China to accelerate its technological development, which in turn spurred American fears of Chinese domination—a self-perpetuating spiral. Each side’s attempt to become safer makes others feel less secure, driving further escalation.
Escaping the chokepoint trap will be difficult precisely because it is collective. Any government that exercises restraint risks becoming a victim. And although the chokepoint trap may resemble the security dilemma, during the Cold War the measures that ultimately contained a runaway cycle of military provocations were implemented only after the deadly threat of the Cuban missile crisis focused leaders’ attention. An obsessive focus on chokepoints might lead to collective disaster, but it will be remarkably hard for states to jump off the escalator and balance making credible threats with offering credible assurances and seeking collective understandings. The most likely outcome is a fragmented world in which governments and private actors alike face increased volatility and the risk of escalation into something much worse: economic shocks, cascading disruptions, and even war.
ONE WAY RATCHET
In the traditional security dilemma, one country’s defensive move can appear offensive to another. A state may seek peaceful relations with a neighbor but worry 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. Its neighbor could reasonably become alarmed. What if the buildup is preparation for an invasion? It may respond by ramping up its own defense spending, leading the first country to grow more suspicious and build up its military further, setting off an escalatory spiral.
Sometimes, of course, governments do have genuinely belligerent intentions. But even if all countries genuinely want peace, they can end up violently distrusting each other and seeking to field massive, expensive armies. In such a mistrustful atmosphere, innocent mistakes can easily be misinterpreted. In a classic 1978 essay about the security dilemma, the political scientist Robert Jervis argued that countries can mitigate the risk of misinterpretation by ensuring that the acts they undertake to enhance their security are obviously defensive rather than offensive—for example, by investing in fortifications deep inside their own territories instead of deploying troops to forward bases. But even passive defenses can heighten tensions: if a country feels better protected against retaliation, its rivals may fear that it will find aggression less risky.
In later writing, Jervis suggested that similar ambiguities might undermine economic and technological security, too. But economic warfare is even likelier to generate unintended escalation than the traditional security dilemma. Unlike military investments, economic policies can be difficult to classify as offensive or defensive. When China builds up its semiconductor sector, is it merely protecting its domestic economy or augmenting its capacity to coerce? Industrial policy can be enacted for a purely defensive reason—to establish resilience against geopolitical shocks. But if such a policy succeeds in building economies of scale, other states might reasonably fear that industrial dominance might be converted into coercive tools.
Chokepoint warfare is a byproduct of globalization itself.
Economic security officials are usually more interested in building capacity than in restraint, whereas traditional economic policymakers are more accustomed to soothing their own markets than to assuaging the concerns of competitors, let alone adversaries. Defense bureaucracies have strong command-and-control structures for a reason: ill-disciplined communications and misaligned decisions can have disastrous consequences. The institutions that make economic policy, by contrast—including central banks and departments of commerce—are usually not set up to speak with one voice. Many are weakly coordinated, and significant authority is delegated to local-level investment and trade agencies. Sometimes, as with central banks, their autonomy is deliberately protected. Whereas military units deployed on discrete missions cannot act without explicit authorization, most economic agencies enjoy wide freedom to act without being accused of going rogue. As this year’s disagreements between the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve over bond yields illustrate, standard bureaucratic infighting can shade into visible conflict.
When governments pursue chokepoint warfare, the problems these institutional ambiguities create get much worse. In September 2025, on the heels of a series of high-level economic negotiations between top U.S. and Chinese officials aimed at stabilizing the bilateral relationship, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security enacted the so-called affiliates rule, which expanded export controls to cover more subsidiaries owned by entities on two U.S. government watch lists. The bureau publicly described the measure as an attempt to close a loophole and lighten administrative burdens; it has since suspended the rule. But the timing made outsiders unsure how to discern its broader strategic meaning. Was Commerce merely tightening the enforcement of existing export controls as part of an ongoing bureaucratic process, or was the United States, as Chinese officials suggested, deliberately engaging in “maximum pressure” tactics in between rounds of bilateral talks?
It can be even harder to interpret what autocracies intend, since policymakers in such regimes are more insulated from public scrutiny. For example, even after China promised to relax its restrictions on the exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets in July 2025, companies that applied for export licenses experienced unexplained delays. It was unclear whether China was deliberately signaling its ability to control critical supply chains or simply struggling to channel requests efficiently through a newly created export-control bureaucracy.
Governments engaging in economic warfare often intentionally write or enforce regulations ambiguously to prompt private actors to overcomply. This behavior makes others much more likely to interpret even hapless bureaucratic mistakes, delays, and unintentional overreach as malign and deliberate plotting. Such mistakes deepen mistrust among great powers, which are already inherently inclined to overrate the possibility of deliberate threats.
Conversely, leaders are often excessively optimistic about their ability to surgically inflict economic pain on target countries. The flow of commerce cannot be steered as carefully as drones can be guided to bomb weapons factories. Even precision measures, such as putting specific firms on export-control lists, can be ineffective. Controlled goods may end up in the possession of subsidiaries or clandestine intermediaries. Broad attempts to close loopholes can go too far, putting thousands of firms with complex ownership ties in the cross hairs of the economic security state.
In October 2025, China again expanded the reach of its rare-earth export controls to retaliate against the affiliates rule and further efforts by Washington to restrict Chinese firms’ access to U.S. technologies. If these measures had not been suspended the following month, they would have affected production chains throughout Europe and Asia as well as in the United States. Officials who dream of an optimized form of chokepoint warfare in which they can fire an economic sniper rifle at judiciously selected targets regularly discover they are wielding a blunderbuss whose pellets fly in all directions—and the collateral damage only increases the risk of retaliatory spirals.
ALL CHOKED UP
The more some countries move to control key chokepoints, the more others will worry about how those chokepoints may be weaponized and seek to leverage their own. The result is a world bristling with chokepoints and defenses in which every power still feels completely insecure. Even the most ordinary kinds of mutual dependence can begin to look like existential security risks. Put another way, in a world in which everything is connected, nearly everything could be considered a chokepoint. A piece of legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2025 and the House in 2026, for instance, identifies even smart ovens and clothes dryers as potential security threats.
Historically effective ways of limiting trade disputes may fail in chokepoint warfare. In traditional tariff wars, governments often try to match like with like, responding to a butter tariff with a countertariff on eggs. Maintaining proportionality is much harder when economic security risks are diverse, when different chokepoints confer different kinds of leverage, and when countries that want to retaliate against the weaponization of one network have to turn to different networks to respond.
In April 2025, when the United States threatened China with sweeping tariffs and boosted its export controls on semiconductors, China could not retaliate by imposing an equivalent restriction on American semiconductors because it does not control the same chokepoint. Instead, it used its advantage over a different bottleneck, rare earths. But when countries weaponize entirely different chokepoints that sit at the center of complex and global supply chains, there is no easy way to judge whether a reaction will match 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 even more dangerous. As Jervis warned, countries persistently worry that technological innovation will create enduring advantages for their adversaries. Such anxieties can worsen the chokepoint trap, inspiring countries to try to impede their rivals’ progress and race to beef up their own autonomy. The Biden administration, anticipating that AI might swiftly accelerate advances in a variety of military and civilian domains, sought to impede Chinese AI development by restricting the country’s access to specialized semiconductors. Administration officials stressed that their goals were limited, describing their approach to China as “small yard, high fence.” Unsurprisingly, Beijing rejected this benign framing and saw the moves as a threat to its long-term future. China accelerated its own semiconductor development and is encouraging its companies to wean themselves from U.S. products, leaving the United States with less influence over Chinese technological development and more reason to worry about future Chinese aggression.
FIRST MOVER
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States began to make much more systematic use of economic and technological chokepoints: snooping on both adversaries and allies, and exploiting the dollar’s dominance to investigate and impose sanctions on foreign banks and companies. American officials came to see the global economy’s interconnectedness as something to manipulate—to deter U.S. opponents or strongarm allies into compliance. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations expanded sanctions to squeeze Iran’s economy, forcing Tehran to the negotiating table. The first Trump administration introduced new technological controls to limit Chinese companies’ access to advanced semiconductors, setting the precedent for the Biden administration’s efforts to impede Chinese AI more broadly.
But during this period, American officials usually paid little attention to the cumulative downside. Financial sanctions, for example, were attractive because most of the costs fell on the foreigners they targeted and foreigners who wanted to do deals with the targets. Exploiting chokepoints became a self-perpetuating enterprise with little purpose beyond sustaining itself. A 2024 Washington Post analysis found that the United States was sanctioning people, properties, or organizations in a third of all countries. Bill Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official, told the newspaper that such sanctions had become “the most important foreign policy tool in the U.S. arsenal,” but “nobody in government is sure this whole strategy is even working.”
Yet the more the United States exploited chokepoints in this way, the more it provoked countermeasures and imitation. And as other powers have begun to develop their own chokepoint capabilities, they are proving no more cautious. China has never hesitated to use economic pressure to get its way. But it used to threaten countries’ access to its domestic market rather than control global bottlenecks. Two key events altered this playbook. In 2013, leaks made by the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extraordinary reach the United States had in global information networks. Then, the first Trump administration’s punishing campaigns against the Chinese telecommunications companies ZTE and Huawei demonstrated Washington’s willingness to coerce.
American officials saw the global economy’s interconnectedness as something to manipulate.
After these shocks, China’s technological debates began to emphasize themes such as “information security” and “decoupling.” Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose speeches once focused on straightforward industrialization, increasingly stressed how economic development could not be separated from national security. His “dual circulation” strategy both sought to reduce dependence on overseas markets and reduce China’s exposure to foreign economic pressure. As Beijing became more conscious of its vulnerability to U.S. technology and finance, it not only accelerated technological self-reliance but created new government structures that mimicked those that Washington used to target other countries, such as an export control regime and security screening for inbound and outbound investment.
China justifies these measures as self-defense. But it has rapidly moved from proportionate responses to dramatic counterescalation. When, in April 2025, Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, China not only imposed licensing restrictions on rare-earth exports but also suggested, a few months later, that its dominance over rare-earth processing gave it regulatory authority over the entire semiconductor supply chain. China also barred some exports of dual-use goods to U.S. defense contractors and civilian technology companies, sanctioned U.S. firms it claimed were engaging in arms sales or technology cooperation with Taiwan’s military, and launched antitrust investigations into Google, Nvidia, and DuPont. Although some of these measures were subsequently suspended or terminated as a result of negotiations with the United States, China has since repeatedly demonstrated its ability to hit back against what it perceives as foreign economic coercion.
In another counteroffensive, Beijing has begun creating a “blocking” regime to punish companies that comply with other countries’ economic security restrictions. Foreign banks that follow U.S. law and stop doing business with a sanctioned Chinese refinery could well be sued in Chinese courts in the future. Rules promulgated in August of this year make it illegal for Chinese firms to provide information or do business with six organizations that do due diligence and risk assessment on supply chains and promote labor rights, making it harder for them to generate the forensics that help companies worldwide comply with American laws.
FOLLOW THE LEADER
By now, China has reshaped its economic policy around a narrow view of its national security concerns. And just like the United States’ chokepoint exploitation did, China’s moves to fence off ever larger parts of its economy will prompt destabilizing counterreactions and imitations. An examination of data from the Global Trade Alert, an independent monitor that tracks government policy changes affecting international trade flows, captures governments’ growing willingness to choke off trade. Since 2020, countries have, on average, enacted seven times as many export restrictions per year as they did between 2010 and 2019. The chokepoint trap is closing on governments as they find themselves entangled in an ever more complicated web of economic and technological conflicts.
In this dynamic, Europe—whose economy is nominally larger than China’s—finds itself perpetually forced to accommodate. Its ability to formulate coherent economic-security strategies and design policy tools is better developed than those of Beijing and Washington. Over the past few years, it has delivered what could be a powerful anti-coercion instrument that would allow it to retaliate extensively against economic pressure, an economic security strategy that identifies the risks of chokepoint warfare, and a Chips Act 2.0 that calls for maintaining Europe’s position as an “indispensable player” in supply chains. But it has struggled to turn words into leverage. It remains deeply dependent on U.S. technology and security guarantees; its dreams of controlling its own chokepoints dissipate in the face of the risk that Washington could tear up its NATO commitments. So far, Europe has not even attempted to deploy its anti-coercion instrument against the United States, despite the Trump administration’s repeated coercion.
Europe is increasingly constrained by dependence on China, too. When the EU imposed countervailing duties on Chinese electric vehicles it found were unfairly subsidized, China was quick to target vital sectors in EU member states, forcing European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to spend precious political capital keeping Berlin and Madrid behind a common EU policy. In September 2025, when the Dutch government attempted to assert its sovereign authority over Nexperia, a Dutch chip manufacturer that was purchased by a Chinese company, Beijing prevented the firm from finishing the chips in China, creating a supply chain crisis across the European car industry. According to a mid-2026 report by Tobias Gehrke, a senior policy analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, Chinese threats are preventing European member states from even contemplating the comprehensive actions they would need to reduce their dependence.
Every European wish to assert strategic autonomy is hemmed in by the expectation that the United States or China will split its solidarity. And national security decisions remain the domain of member states, preventing the EU from leveraging potential chokepoints. Europe has made huge strides in acting collectively to impose sanctions against Russia, but enforcement still largely depends on national governments. The result is a bloc that understands the dangers of escalation better than the United States or China but cannot do much to avoid them.
Japan, meanwhile, began to think about the threat posed by Chinese coercion early and has better tailored its approach, balancing strategic autonomy and resilience against potential external coercion with control over vital technological chokepoints. It has created a national stockpile of rare earths to mitigate Chinese efforts to pressure its economy while making itself indispensable to U.S. military supply chains. But even Japan has shown it can succumb to the seduction of chokepoint politics: in 2019, it limited South Korea’s access to key semiconductor chemicals in response to the country’s pursuit of reparations for World War II harms.
And now, even smaller, poorer countries have been caught up in the spiral. Some have benefited from the spread of chokepoint warfare in the short term: the Philippines, for instance, won millions in grants from the United States when Washington attempted to press allies to block Huawei from their telecommunications infrastructures. Others are simply getting squeezed. The Kachin Independence Army in Myanmar is selling dysprosium and terbium, which are used in industrial magnets, to fuel its civil war against the military junta—giving China, the main buyer, greater leverage over the conflict. Greenland, with its vast supply of natural resources, has faced repeated military threats from Trump. As time goes on, the costs are likely to heavily outweigh the benefits, even for countries receiving some side payments. Governments in smaller, poorer countries want the autonomy to chart a path toward greater prosperity for their citizens. The global obsession with economic security makes finding that path harder.
NO WAY OUT
Right now, the United States and China are locked in a short-term stasis. Washington is moderating its use of chokepoints out of fear of ferocious blowback, and China sees little benefit in direct provocation. But this moment of stability is likely to be fleeting. Even after Trump leaves the White House, the United States will certainly keep pressing for global technological dominance, and it is likely to continue its efforts to dominate energy. China will keep pursuing policies aimed at quietly building dependencies and undermining the United States’ coercive power. Stalemates are fragile in a world in which the incentives inexorably point toward escalation.
The powers with the most latitude to shape the world now see chokepoints as capabilities. Their vision rarely stretches to the strategic implications of their actions. As they build their offensive capacities and shore up their defenses, they convince themselves that they are ensuring their own security. Instead, they are miring themselves in a chokepoint arms race that will render them, as well as everyone else, much less secure. The jealousies of the traditional national security dilemma are now spilling over into the global economy. A world in which economic chokepoints become forts, garrisons, and guns all at once will be characterized by perpetual low-level economic conflict and the ever-present risk of larger conflagrations.
To identify broader solutions, some scholars and policy thinkers look to the Cold War for inspiration, emphasizing the value of de-escalation and mutual restraint. During that era, the risk of nuclear war was mitigated with regular meetings to establish a shared understanding of redlines and systems that ensure effective communication in a crisis. Over time, these gave rise to more formal arrangements, such as treaties regulating arms and troop movements, enforced by satellites and other means of monitoring. An assurance-based security logic can, in some cases, insulate economic chokepoints from weaponization. Singapore, for instance, has signed agreements with Australia and New Zealand to keep essential supplies flowing between their countries. In 2022, the World Trade Organization’s members agreed not to place export restrictions on food purchased by the World Food Program for humanitarian purposes.
Yet it will be difficult to turn such commitments into a large-scale system of effective communication and mutual restraint. It took the Cuban missile crisis and the threat of nuclear annihilation to awaken the Cold War’s antagonists to how individually rational acts could lead to collectively awful outcomes. Today, as the cycle of mutual suspicion gathers speed, it becomes increasingly hard to reverse. The more governments create bureaucracies devoted to identifying and controlling economic chokepoints, the more a chokepoint logic becomes the default lens through which they make even routine economic policy. It is no coincidence that Europe, the great power that is the most hesitant to actually weaponize chokepoints, is also the power that is least capable of deploying them.
A chokepoint arms race will make everyone much less secure.
It is more likely that the chokepoint trap will tighten. Military competition has long driven states to build similar institutions—armed forces, defense bureaucracies, and domestic weapons industries. This kind of mirroring is already beginning to happen in economic security. China is becoming more like the United States, building bureaucratic tools to leverage chokepoints against its adversaries; meanwhile, the United States is imitating China, intervening in its domestic economy to reshape it around security concerns. The European Union will choose between managing its slide to irrelevance or radically reforming its internal balance of power in order to keep up. Smaller powers will do what they can to emulate bigger ones while relying on their protection.
This will be hard for governments, but much worse for international business. Firms will have to navigate a labyrinthine and unpredictable global economy in which payment and information systems are fragmented and clashing powers try alternately to press them into service or squeeze them out of existence. Multinational corporations may become unified entities in name only, as their subsidiaries face countervailing pressures from host governments. Economic efficiencies that seem natural today, such as the seamlessness of international financial transactions, may evaporate as governments equate global infrastructures with national insecurity.
Even this is not the worst-case scenario. The greatest risk posed by the chokepoint trap is not its predictable miseries but its unpredictable disasters. Suspicion, misunderstanding, and intense competition in the realm of economic security can create an ideal recipe for war. Take just one hypothetical. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which additional Chinese restrictions on rare-earth magnets degrade, among other things, the United States’ ability to rebuild the missile stockpiles that this year’s Iran war has depleted. Whether or not Beijing intended this effect, U.S. leaders could easily interpret such an act as evidence that China plans to launch a military offensive against Taiwan before the United States can achieve full independence from Chinese supply chains, prompting a sense of urgency in Washington to strike first.
There is plenty of historical precedent for what may seem to be a marginal and worst-case scenario. In The Economic Weapon, the historian Nicholas Mulder documents how, in the 1930s, Axis powers’ fears of League of Nations sanctions and potential economic isolation led them to aggressively seize territory and resources before it was too late. The chokepoint trap is bad enough. What it leads to can be worse.
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