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US Sanctions and Emerging Multipolar Resistance - A Report
The United States leverages its “centrality” within global financial networks, particularly through the dominance of the US dollar and its influence over institutions such as SWIFT, to exert coercive economic pressure on other states. US sanctions policy has increasingly shifted from traditional trade embargoes toward targeted and secondary sanctions, extending pressure to non-sanctioned states and entities maintaining commercial or financial relations with sanctioned countries. India’s continued trade with Russia, particularly in crude oil, illustrates the pressures generated by this approach.
Cover by The Geostrata
Such financial coercion has encouraged states to develop alternative mechanisms to reduce dependence on Western-dominated financial infrastructure. Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) and China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) are prominent examples. The growing use of these mechanisms has also facilitated greater trade and settlement in local currencies, potentially reducing dependence on the US dollar.
However, these alternatives remain far from possessing the scale, liquidity, institutional depth, and global acceptance required to replace the dollar-centred system.
Nevertheless, the increasing use of sanctions and “weaponised interdependence” is contributing to a gradual transition toward financial multipolarity. Rather than replacing the existing system outright, multiple alternative networks are emerging, offering states greater resilience against sanctions and gradually eroding the United States’ centrality within global financial networks.
In February-March 2022, G7 members and the European Union coordinated measures that immobilised roughly $300 billion of Russian central-bank assets held in their jurisdictions and, through EU sanctions, required SWIFT to disconnect designated Russian banks. This was the largest and most expansive financial sanction imposed on a major world economy.
However, it was not an exception; rather, it was part of a trend starting from the early 2000s, when the US slowly shifted strategies from broad trade embargoes to the weaponisation of global financial institutions such as SWIFT and dollar dominance, which was cemented by the 1944 Bretton Woods institutions. Economic interdependence was interpreted as bringing a pacifying force and a shared commitment to mutual growth; however, it has also allowed certain nations with political influence over global economic bodies to weaponise it and use it as an extension of their geopolitical influence.
EXPLAINING WEAPONISED INTERDEPENDENCE
The institutions created in the pursuit of efficiency by market forces in an asymmetric network can be used by states for the coercive propagation of their economic and political ideals. This enables two forms of weaponisation of interdependence.
Firstly, the panopticon effect, which refers to gaining critical details from the information flows of other nations. This is done by states with jurisdiction or physical access to the hubs through which communication is facilitated and relied on due to the massive economic benefits. While the phenomenon has existed during the early periods of globalisation, advancements in technology have allowed states to increase their surveillance networks to use digital records of private players such as banks and everyday electronics such as smartphones as active sensors.
Secondly, the chokepoint effect, which refers to the states’ ability to deny or limit access to the ‘hub’, thereby imposing severe consequences on the other state. Historically, during the First World War, the UK, with a monopoly on transoceanic communication, cut German undersea cables to hamper their wartime capability.
A state’s ability to leverage these effects is subject to the amount of jurisdictional and physical access it has to these hubs, which helps explain why a large number of these hubs are located in the US and across the EU. However, the institutional framework and state-society relationship, in the form of privacy laws and public outrage over weaponisation, also serve as considerations regarding the degree of effective use of these methods.
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For all official and academic purposes, use the following as a citation, which follows the Chicago Manual Style.
Dakshesh Shukla
“US Sanctions and Emerging
Multipolar Resistance”
THE GEOSTRATA, October 2, 2026.
BY DAKSHESH SHUKLA
STRATEGIC STUDIES CENTRE
TEAM GEOSTRATA
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