You are cordially invited to a book event for
Treasury’s War:
The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare
with
Juan C. Zarate
Senior Adviser, Transnational Threats Project and Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Program
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Tuesday, April 22
4:30 PM
The Institute of World Politics
1521 16th Street NW
Washington, DC 20036
Parking Map
Please contact sdwyer@iwp.edu with any questions.
About the book
For more than a decade, America has been waging a new kind of war against the financial networks of rogue regimes, proliferators, terrorist groups, and criminal syndicates. Juan Zarate, a chief architect of modern financial warfare and a former senior Treasury and White House official, pulls back the curtain on this shadowy world. In this gripping story, he explains in unprecedented detail how a small, dedicated group of officials redefined the Treasury’s role and used its unique powers, relationships, and reputation to apply financial pressure against America’s enemies.
This group unleashed a new brand of financial power-one that leveraged the private sector and banks directly to isolate rogues from the international financial system. By harnessing the forces of globalization and the centrality of the American market and dollar, Treasury developed a new way of undermining America’s foes. Treasury and its tools soon became, and remain, critical in the most vital geopolitical challenges facing the United States, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and the regimes in Iran, North Korea, and Syria.
This book is the definitive account, by an unparalleled expert, of how financial warfare has taken pride of place in American foreign policy and how America’s competitors and enemies are now learning to use this type of power themselves. This is the unique story of the United States’ financial war campaigns and the contours and uses of financial power, and of the warfare to come.
About the author
Juan Zarate is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the senior national security analyst for CBS News, a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and a national security and financial integrity consultant. Zarate served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism from 2005 to 2009 and was responsible for developing and implementing the U.S. government’s counterterrorism strategy and policies related to transnational security threats. He was the first ever assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, where he led domestic and international efforts to attack terrorist financing, the innovative use of the Treasury Department’s national security-related powers, and the global hunt for Saddam Hussein’s assets. He is also a former federal prosecutor who served on terrorism prosecution teams prior to 9/11, including the investigation of the USS Cole attack.
Zarate is the author of the recently published Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare (PublicAffairs, 2013), Forging Democracy (University Press of America,1994), and a variety of articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Quarterly, and other publications. He has his own weekly national security program on CBSNews.com called Flash Points. He is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School and a former Rotary International Fellow (Universidad de Salamanca, Spain). Zarate sits on several boards of advisers, including for the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and HSBC’s Financial Services Vulnerabilities Committee.