Gesture of triumph, even if one’s own power is waning: US President Donald TrumpImage: keystone
Dangerous logic: What does the Iran war have in common with the death of Swiss banking secrecy?
April 20, 2026, 09:56April 20, 2026, 09:56
It is always the same logic according to which seemingly fundamentally different conflicts take place. Trump’s confused Iran war. Trump’s also confusing trade war. Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine. The series of examples goes back to the destruction of Swiss banking secrecy by the USA. It all started on September 11, 2001 with Osama bin Laden’s terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York.
In retrospect, the USA realized that they could have thwarted the attacks, as two US professors describe in their book “Empire in the Underground”. The USA would have had to do what it shied away from before September 11th, but what Trump is doing today almost without inhibition: use global networks such as trade or payment transactions as a weapon against their opponents.
The network in question at the time was the Swift communications system – a type of postal system through which banks around the world communicate with each other and process payments. By monitoring this mail, the United States could have followed Osama bin Laden’s money flow, identified and thwarted his plans. They didn’t do it before 9/11 for fear of destroying trust in the global financial system, as the book says. After 9/11, they turned the Swift system into an “omniscient servant.”
Former President George Bush (r.) with ex-Vice President Dick Cheney (l.) commemorate the victims of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, a week later.Image: AP
This allowed the USA to monitor the global financial system. They could recognize when a company or individual was doing something they didn’t like. They haven’t been able to punish this person yet. However, they gained this ability with dollar clearing. 90 percent of world trade is carried out via the dollar. Ultimately, almost every payment has to be processed or “cleared” via US banks.
So if the USA instructed its banks to exclude a foreign bank from this dollar clearing, that bank was not only eliminated from the US market, but was immediately excluded from world trade. Through dollar clearing, the US had power over foreign banks – and through foreign banks, the US was also able to exclude individuals worldwide from the global financial system. The USA now had a servant who was not only “all-knowing” but could also wield a mighty club.
This club fell on Switzerland in 2008. At that time, banking data from Switzerland was leaked to foreign authorities, which showed how Swiss banks helped their customers in Germany or the USA to evade taxes. Federal Councilor Hans Rudolf Merz (FDP) scoffed that the USA would bite its teeth into Swiss banking secrecy. But US President Barack Obama had an answer.
Bank secrecy was just history
Obama didn’t even attack the Swiss state, but went straight to the big bank UBS, as the Basel economics professor Yvan Lengwiler wrote many years later in an article for “Die “Volkswirtschaft”. The USA began criminal proceedings against UBS. “It was clear: If convicted, the systemically important UBS would be considered a criminal organization and would no longer have a reasonable economic basis in the USA. The threat to dollar clearing was particularly significant.” Bank secrecy soon became history. In the end, threatening with the club was enough.
Former Federal Councilor Hans-Rudolf Merz believed in the inviolability of Swiss banking secrecy.Image: KEYSTONE
For Switzerland it was a painful defeat, for the USA it was a demonstration of power. They had demonstrated to the world a mechanism that researchers would later call “Weaponized Interdependence.” Mutual dependencies are weaponized.
These dependencies form when countries work together and integrate their economies. This is how global networks are created, in trade, energy or payment transactions. Goods are transported by sea or in the air or data is transported in underground cable networks. Everyone actually benefits. Everyone gets richer.
These dependencies become a weapon when individual countries can exert leverage at certain points in these networks and thus exercise power over the entire network and its participating countries. In English, these places are called “choke points”.
Before Trump, the USA used this power somewhat cautiously. They feared that other countries would otherwise defend themselves. Geopolitical opponents in particular would try to free themselves from the club-wielding, all-knowing servant of the USA. They would go their own way and the servant would lose his power.
Cooperation turns into submission
Trump, on the other hand, has no worries. But instead of using dollar clearing as his “choke point,” he chose the US market. The message to the world is: Do what I want, otherwise I will exclude you from the US market or at least make life difficult for you there with tariffs. Trump was completely unleashed on his so-called “day of liberation”.
But the world has seen through Trump’s game – and is fighting back. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned: “Major powers are increasingly using economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as a means of pressure and the financial infrastructure as a means of coercion.” Carney called for recognition of this new world. “You cannot live in the illusion of mutual benefit through integration if this leads to subjugation.”
Increasingly, however, other countries are also weaponizing mutual dependencies.
China plays this same game particularly successfully with rare earths. This is actually a normal relationship between manufacturer and customer. But when China stopped supplying the USA with rare earths, it became clear that the customer USA needs the rare earths more than the manufacturer China needs the customer USA. The US economy whined and complained and Trump gave in. He lowered tariffs on Chinese goods again. China had beaten the USA – with its own weapons.
Beat Trump at his own game – Chinese President Xi Jinping.Image: keystone
It was an embarrassing defeat, but it threatens to be even more embarrassing for Trump in the Iran war. Iran has demonstrated that even a third-rate power, with a military that is tiny compared to the USA, can turn economic integration into its own weapon and direct it against the USA.
The Strait of Hormuz, which Iran is now successfully blocking, is also a “choke point”, just like dollar clearing, the US market or rare earths. Just as Trump threatens to exclude him from the US market, Iran can do the same with the Strait of Hormuz: do what we want or we will block 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. The “Wall Street Journal” headline: “Through its control over the Strait of Hormuz, Iran joins the USA and China on the list of countries that use choke points as a weapon.”
Soon everyone is playing Trump’s dangerous game
And the spirit that the USA summoned and will probably no longer be able to get rid of could soon rage even more wildly. Because what the USA can do, what China and Iran can do, many countries can do even more, writes economist Paul Krugman on the Substack platform. Without Taiwan the world would not have enough semiconductors, without South Korea not enough memory chips, without India not enough pharmaceuticals, including vaccines. Today, tens of countries are so economically dependent on each other and produce together in such a complex way that “there are choke points wherever you look.” (aargauerzeitung.ch)