AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
The recent fuel protests by farmers and hauliers illustrated a useful point. It’s possible to win wars and gain concessions without bloodshed. The principle is simple, you deprive the other side of something that is vital for survival.
In unarmed one-to-one combat you deprive your opponent of air by getting them by the throat. In other words, choking. The trucks and tractors were used by protestors to choke traffic and block main road arteries that keep the country moving.
It’s an old trick and one used for centuries by countries fortunate enough to have topography offering convenient chokepoints where trade and supplies could be cut off. The narrow channel of the Bosphorus between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean provides historic examples and currently the closure of the Straits of Hormuz is choking off 20% of the world’s oil supplies.
Blockades and sieges are other choking techniques which have been used with varying success to bring rivals to their knees, but how can the same kind of techniques be used in a globalised world?
A fascinating book, Chokepoints, by Edward Fishman, an US authority on economic statecraft and sanctions, takes a look at how economic warfare is changing the world, as the US dollar, oil, tariffs, sanctions, technology and essential minerals have become the modern means to lay waste to rivals without firing a weapon.
“In a world in which the spectre of nuclear annihilation made a hot war between the great powers almost unthinkable, globalisation gave states a more viable way to fight. This was the context in which the US built its economic arsenal, the context that birthed the Age of Economic Warfare,” writes Fishman. The decoupling of the dollar from gold, its dominance in the world market as the currency for trade, free capital flow and the internet, the establishment globalised supply chains, all set the stage for America in particular to wage bloodless warfare.
In today’s uncertain world economic war has the potential to stop traditional war or to stop hostile programmes by players in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction like the nuclear bomb. Cutting off trade, money, oil or applying sanctions may sound effective in theory but they may not always work in practice.
For instance, when Saddam Hussein launched Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the UN Security Council banned trade with Iraq on condition that sanctions wouldn’t be lifted until Iraqi forces were withdrawn. Saddam refused to back down and the US and Allied forces had to be used to oust the invaders. The embargo to deter Saddam’s nuclear ambitions continued and eventually contributed to George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003.
As tensions mounted between the US and North Korea in 2005 shutting down a bank which gave that country crucial connection to the US financial system was likened to the effectiveness of a 21st century guided munition. “You Americans have found a way to hurt us,” said a North Korean official. But, Fishman writes: “The proving ground for America’s new economic weapons was a much bigger country. That country was Iran.”
Sanctions and economic pressure were applied and eventually resulted in the Iran deal in 2015 where Iran agreed to limit its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief. Trump has now torn up the deal and has evidently forgotten the lessons learned in Iraq in going to war on Iran. The threat of the physical chokepoint in the Straits of Hormuz was overlooked too and the world is feeling the disastrous consequences of the closure of that artery for 20% of the oil trade.
Using economic warfare against Russia following Putin’s annexation of the Crimea and invasion of Ukraine has been trickier, according to Fishman, where European countries depend on Russian oil and gas. “Any sanctions imposed on Russia needed to be limited in scope and scalpel-like in their precision.” There also needed to be unity in their application, but hard choices weren’t made, too little was done too late by countries acting in self-interest allowing Russia time to strategise.
Can America and major players rely on economic warfare in future as an alternative in the face of Russian imperialism and China’s bid for world mastery? Only when the chokepoints are still able to squeeze so tight and the impossible trinity of interdependence, geopolitical competition and security are resolved, Fishman concludes.
