Treasury's War

Treasury's War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare
By Juan Zarate
Published in September 2013
512 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 3/5

Treasury’s War is an insider account of how the US government invented and deployed targeted sanctions. The book was written by Juan Zarate, a neoconservative who was appointed by Bush to lead his sanctions efforts in the US treasury. He held various other roles in the Bush and Obama administrations. Now he runs his own private intelligence and consulting firm.

Prior to the 9/11 attacks most sanctions were embargos. They banned Americans from doing business with entire categories of goods or countries. After 9/11 the Bush administration leveraged new technologies to develop what it called “targeted sanctions.”

After the September 11 attacks, the US government brought on board experts who had history fighting organized crime, rather than terrorism and nation states. These new experts developed targeted sanctions. Zarate was one of these anti-organized crime experts.

Targeted sanctions target specific people or companies, rather than entire countries or industries.

Targeted sanctions were enforced by fining and penalizing banks that did business with rogue states or terrorists. This had the advantage of being unilateral enforceable by US authorities without involving other companies. This meant that, for example, a Lebanese bank that banked Al Qaeda risked getting fined and cut off from the US financial system; as a result nearly all banks in the world including in countries like Russia and China would follow US sanctions.

This history of targeted sanctions is one of incredible success, partial success, and finally reading through the lines, the ultimate collapse of the US dollar. Zarate, being one of the people who invented this sanctions technique, is very positive. Many of my judgments come from interpreting his information through the lens of my own outside information.

Targeted sanctions may have been what ultimately led to US victory over Al Qaeda after 9/11. Al Qaeda was largely funded through donations from ideologically sympathetic Saudis and Muslim businessmen. When these businessmen faced targeted sanctions which threatened to cut them off from the global banking system, they withdrew their support for terrorists. As the funding dried up, so did Al Qaeda recruitment and attacks. Now Al Qaeda still exists, but is almost powerless.

The Bush administration expanded targeted sanctions to target rogue states such as Syria, Iran, and North Korea. These had mixed results. On one hand, the US successfully seized billions of dollars of assets from rogue state leaders. This forced them to negotiate. On the other hand, political inconsistencies made them seem biased and unfair; internal US government disputes made their rollouts chaotic; and overuse allowed American enemies to slowly develop an immunity against these measures.

Zarate’s book ends in 2013. However, these are the very same sanctions that would be used against Russia in 2014 and 2021. These targeted sanctions have completely failed to move Russian policy. In fact, it has significantly weakened the US dollar. Many nations now distrust the US, which is no longer seen as an impartial actor. Countries like Russia, Iran, and China are now building large parallel banking systems that bypass the US dollar entirely - and threaten the US economy.

I decided to pick up this book after Trump’s failed “Liberation Day” where he attempted to force all US trade partners to renegotiate trade deals. Like targeted sanctions, Liberation Day has contributed to a significant weakening of the US dollar.

Targeted sanctions have had their moments. For example, US officials waited to freeze Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s assets right when it was the most critical. Right before it came time for Gaddafi to pay his soldiers and mercenaries, tens of billions of dollars of his assets were frozen. The unpaid mercenaries and soldiers then refused to fight, contributing to his resounding defeat during the civil war.

Zarate also details many underhanded and sketchy government tactics.

First, Zarate describes how the treasury pressured SWIFT into monitoring transactions and handing over sensitive data. SWIFT is based in Belgium, and is supposed to be impartial. Zarate and the US government destroyed this partiality by politicizing it; but attempted to keep it secret in an attempt to preserve the appearance of SWIFT’s neutrality.

Later, when the New York Times caught wind that SWIFT was being used to monitor the financing of potential terrorists, the US Treasury attempted to silence the New York Times journalists and pressured them to withdraw their coverage.

Zarate also describes how US treasury officials used non-legal means to pressure banks to monitor their bank accounts and shut down terrorists. US Treasury officials will approach banks (including non-US banks) and tell them that they have intelligence that terrorists are operating within the bank. They will then send officials to meet with bank leadership and compliance officers, under conditions of strict secrecy. They will hand over intelligence to the bank that suggests terrorists are operating within it and make recommendations. Banks will then privately take measures to close accounts and freeze assets of suspected terrorists - without having received direct orders from the US government, which may not govern it. I can’t help but wonder if similar tactics were used to freeze the accounts of right wing commentators like Lauren Southern and Richard Spencer during the late 2010s.

Although it wasn’t Zarate’s intention, this book explains to me why the US dollar is in the process of falling. The world reserve currency needs to be neutral. It also underscores the importance of neutral and apolitical cryptocurrencies which are outside of the control of nation states.

This book will not be of interest to most average readers. However, due to a lot of my specific AML and CFT work, I found it very interesting. It also informed my geopolitical understanding and investments. I would recommend it to a narrow band of researchers studying money laundering and sanctions but not to a general audience.

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