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"Treasury's War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare," by Juan Zarate

Book Review Editor
Sunday, March 23, 2014, 11:39 PM

Published by PublicAffairs (2013)

Reviewed by Alan Rozenshtein

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Published by PublicAffairs (2013)


Reviewed by Alan Rozenshtein


This is a boom time in new ways to wage war. Drones and cyber get most of the attention, but if you’re committed to bringing a country to its knees, cut it off from international financial markets. This reality, along with dissatisfaction with traditional sanctions, led U.S. policymakers to develop a new way to bring economic power to bear in the service of foreign policy and national security after 9/11: using the private sector’s own aversion to financial crime to isolate bad actors from global financial markets. In Treasury's War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare---a combination of memoir and history of the Treasury Department’s national-security activities in the first decade after 9/11---Juan Zarate describes the development and initial implementation of this new “brand of financial warfare.” Zarate’s account raises questions about the limits of these tactics, and it remains an open question whether they will ever fulfill his vision to become a central component in America’s national-security and foreign-policy toolkit.



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