Welcome to the President's inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boy's Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S.

Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is The New Age of Economic Warfare.

With me to discuss the expanded use of financial and trade sanctions by the United States in recent years,

and whether they have enabled Washington to achieve its foreign policy objectives is Edward Fishman.

Eddie is a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy and an adjunct professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University.

From 2015 to 2017, he was a member of the Secretary of State's policy planning staff

and represented the State Department at the

National Security Council's Strategic Planning Group.

He was previously the Russia and Europe lead in the State Department's Office of Economic

Sanctions Policy and implementation, and before that, he was a member of the Iran Sanctions

Team during the nuclear control negotiations.

He is the author of the new book, Choke Points, American Power in an Age of Economic Warfare.

Eddie, thanks for joining me on the President's inbox and congratulations on the excellent reviews that Choke Points has received.

I see the Financial Times

has called it a masterful narrative in the Wall Street Journal called it compelling and dramatic.

Thank you so much, Jim. I've been a fan of this podcast for many years, so I'm excited to be here today.

Well, I'm glad to have a chance to chat, Eddie. I want to get

into the ways in which successive U.S. administrations over the past 15 years or so have used various

tools of economic statecraft to try to bend others to Washington's will.

But before we do so, I want to begin with what I would call the conventional wisdom about economic

sanctions, and that is, they don't work very well.

So what was the conventional wisdom and why did it come about?

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