This piece originally appeared in City Journal.
Asked which candidate he supported in the 2008 presidential election, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan responded, “National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.” With globalization replacing U.S. policy action, he explained, there wasn’t much for statesmen to do anymore. Now we could just watch the neutral pipework of the world economy do its thing, without interference from politics.
Greenspan didn’t know what was coming. As international relations scholar Edward Fishman shows in Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, economic and political matters are now fundamentally intertwined. In our “age of economic warfare,” international trade is important not just for consumer welfare and growth, but also for geopolitical competition and national security. Policymakers have even developed a new vocabulary to make sense of this convergence of statecraft and market craft, inventing phrases like “de-risking,” “decoupling,” and “friendshoring.”
Fishman, a professor at Columbia and veteran of the State Department, Pentagon, and Treasury, has produced an important study of how we entered this new world—and what might come next.
