Review of Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare by Eddie Fishman. Portfolio, 2025.
Edward Fishman, a former US government official now teaching at Columbia University, has written the definitive history of contemporary US sanctions policy, documenting America’s growing assertiveness and creativity in leveraging financial and technological chokepoints in response to the varied challenges presented by Iran, Russia, and China. Fishman describes a world grappling with an impossible trinity of economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition: the reemergence of geopolitical competition has brought the end of the post-Cold War era of interdependence and security. The dominance of the dollar system, which has enabled the US to impose stark penalties on adversaries, is being challenged as countries seek to mitigate their exposure by building alternatives.
While China especially is pursuing several initiatives to degrade Washington’s ability to pursue economic warfare, including a digital currency and a counter-sanctions law, Fishman sees the biggest threat to the dollar emanating from instability in America’s own political system. On Russia, Fishman acknowledges that if the threat of sanctions were intended to deter it from invading Ukraine, they have clearly failed, leading him to posit that the best approach to China may be to degrade its capabilities before conflict has begun. This contrasts with others who have argued that preemptive, unilateral decoupling may ultimately make the US more vulnerable to conflict. Fishman is on firmer ground in arguing that America’s largely improvised sanctions regime needs to be replaced by a dedicated “economic war council” focused on planning and coordination with allies.
Review of Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China by Emily Feng. Crown, 2025.
Let Only Red Flowers Bloom details the Communist Party’s systematic efforts to control and dismantle minority identity in favor of a misogynistic, Mandarin-speaking, Han-centric conception of Chineseness. Emily Feng, a reporter for NPR expelled from China in 2022 and now based in Taiwan, renders an essential, devastating portrait of dictatorship at work. The stories of ethnic Mongolians — who once found security in being the country’s “model minority” — mourning the loss of their language appear alongside Hong Kongers’ 2019 fight to preserve their liberal identity. Echoing Niemöller’s “First They Came,” Feng recounts how China’s Hui Muslims initially believed themselves immune from the suffocating measures imposed on Uyghur Muslims, only to later confront their own struggles with bureaucratic erasure, surveillance, intimidation, detention, and, increasingly, extraterritorial reach.
By focusing the final chapter on China’s American diaspora during Covid, Feng misses an opportunity to connect the authoritarianism perfected on the Uyghur population to the zero-Covid policies later imposed on the rest of the country. Indeed, it was a 2022 apartment fire in Xinjiang — whose deadly outcome was attributed to a pandemic lockdown which hampered emergency services and residents’ escape — that inspired an extraordinary wave of nationwide protest. For many Han Chinese, it was the first time they saw their struggles as connected and hastened the end of the country’s pandemic measures.
“Understanding how the Chinese state sees itself and who it wants its citizens to be, are foundational to understanding China’s policies, which in turn, are increasingly influential in shaping foreign and economic policy around the world,” Feng writes. Her examination of a party-state that conflates difference with dissent reveals a China so hostile to its own diversity that it poses a growing threat to difference beyond its borders — rendering Xi Jinping’s calls for a “community of common destiny for mankind” in a chilling light.
Review of China’s Quest for Military Supremacy by Joel Wuthnow and Philip C. Saunders. Polity, 2025.
China’s military “is stronger and more confident today than at any point in its history, although it has intrinsic flaws that neither technology nor money will solve, and that create vulnerabilities should the [People’s Liberation Army (PLA)] ever be ordered into combat,” according to two US-based scholars.
In concise chapters, Joel Wuthnow and Philip C. Saunders, both of the National Defense University, argue that the PLA is not fully trusted by China’s leaders, corrupt, untested, poorly coordinated, and hindered by a decision making culture that discourages the initiative and flexibility needed in war time. Despite all these flaws, it is – and will only become more so – a formidable competitor to the United States.
Xi Jinping has focused intensely on reasserting greater Party control over the military, reining in the excess autonomy permitted during the reform era without resolving the fundamental tension between an army that is “red” (loyal) and one that is “expert.” The military’s modernization goes well beyond a rapid build-out of ever-more capable military assets, seeking to create a force that is less army-centric and better integrated to conduct joint operations.
As China’s military has evolved from a guerilla force to a modern, regional power, its focus has shifted from winning control of the country, to defending against great power conflict during the Cold War, and now to standing ready to assert control over Taiwan. Wuthnow and Saunders stress that neither a full-on invasion, by choice or necessity, is as likely as the intensification of grey zone tactics.
On net, the authors are ambivalent about whether Russia’s difficulties in Ukraine have truly given Beijing pause. Just as plausibly, they argue, the war has offered China a roadmap for deterring US intervention through nuclear threats and reinforced its drive to insulate the economy against potential sanctions.
Beyond Taiwan, the PLA’s global reach remains limited, involving a combination of peacekeeping operations, military exercises, rare evacuations of its citizens abroad, and anti-piracy efforts in the Gulf of Aden. While China is believed to be pursuing additional foreign military bases beyond its only current base in Djibouti, the authors suggest China’s influence over commercial ports can more efficiently serve a dual-use purpose. They add that more important than building its own network of bases is the possibility of China pressuring third countries to deny the US military from operating from their territory in the event of conflict.
China may be willing to assume greater risk in operating abroad as a means to gaining experience that even the most robust military exercises cannot replicate. The absence of a global command structure is currently a limiting factor, but the authors suggest a Chinese presence in a place like Afghanistan is an eventuality that cannot be ruled out. (Stepped up involvement in Myanmar’s ongoing civil war seems marginally more likely.)
For all its comprehensiveness, some topics deserved greater attention. These include limited coverage of China’s approach to artificial intelligence in the military; the robustness and responsiveness of the country’s defense industrial base, particularly in a mobilization scenario; and the (perhaps unknowable) ability of China’s intelligence services to operate effectively in wartime.
As a foreigner in China, it was jarring to see the American military’s comings and goings given more comprehensive coverage than is typical in US media about its own military, let alone another country’s. The trajectory of the PLA that Wuthnow and Saunders document underscores that it is not just defense specialists who ought to now be paying attention.