Allies As Collateral: U.S. Economic Warfare and the Erosion of Allied Autonomy
Law is presumed territorial. The United States has built an exception: a coordinated system of extraterritorial statutes, enforcement actions, financial sanctions, export controls, and surveillance that regulates allies’ economic choices. High-profile flare-ups (from tariffs to tech bans) are not aberrations but surface signals of a long-running regime. This article asks how this system works and why allied states largely accept it across international, constitutional, administrative, and business law. The answer lies in infrastructure and dependence: dollar centrality, data and cloud control, compliance architectures, and networked payment rails that translate U.S. law into everyday constraints abroad. Mapping these mechanisms, this article shows how domestic law has become a tool of alliance management and economic governance, narrowing the space for autonomous policy while preserving the form of sovereignty. The payoff is conceptual and practical: it reframes extraterritoriality as a stable method of rule, identifies the channels through which authority travels, and evaluates why resistance is rare and costly. It closes with an agenda (data sovereignty, baseline principles for digital jurisdiction, coordinated digital taxation, and due-process guardrails) to bound unilateral reach and restore contestability without abandoning interdependence.
Recommended Citation: Julien Chaisse, Allies As Collateral: U.S. Economic Warfare and the Erosion of Allied Autonomy, 49 Fordham Int'l L.J. 705 (2026).