The more novel form of chokepoints, which is a child of the hyperglobalization period of the 1990s, are these economic chokepoints that involve financial systems. RA: If you had to rank the top five global chokepoints today, what would they be? The U.S. government has said that a cutoff could cost the United States alone more than half a trillion dollars. That revealed that they thought that this was just a trade war, where we were going to do tariffs, China was going to do tariffs. China showed us that they also have chokepoints they can weaponize, the same way the United States can use the dollar as a cudgel.