During the war on terror, the United States quietly turned the world financial system into a hidden empire. The American government used the power of the dollar and its influence over obscure organizations such as the Swift financial messaging service to monitor what its adversaries and terrorists were doing and, in some cases, to cut ...

The Biden administration has built an unprecedented machine for economic and technological coercion. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its allies cut off Russia’s access to its own central bank reserves held outside Russia. The administration revamped export controls to strangle China’s access to the powerful and specialized semiconductors needed to train A.I., ...