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.

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........

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