What’s the name of the book, and where can we find it?

Charles A. Dainoff, Robert M. Farley, and Geoffrey F. Williams. 2025. Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages, Lynne Rienner Publishers.

What’s the argument?

Security analysts conceptualize “domains” as distinct arenas of competition. They originally thought in terms of three major domains: “land,” “air,” and “maritime.” Now they usually add two more: “space” and “cyber.” We add a sixth domain: “finance.”

Finance has been critical to war since the invention of currency. Its importance has evolved over time in novel and nuanced ways. We cannot understand state power in the modern international system without centering the financial “domain.” The book therefore explores finance by using the same analytics and tools that national-security professionals use for the five other major domains. We discuss finance’s history, its “commons,” and key “revolutions in financial affairs” such as the development of coinage, the development of public banks and tradable debt, the creation and maintenance of the classic gold standard, and the digitization of financial flows in the 21st century.

Why should we care?

There is no way to truly understand contemporary security affairs without close attention to of the ways in which states compete within an ever-evolving finance domain. This is true of the war in Ukraine; US efforts against al Qaeda and North Korea; and emerging competition between the United States and China.

Why will we find it persuasive?

The book is not really designed to change minds. Rather, its goals is to help organize thinking in ways that parallel how scholars and policymakers think about other instruments of national security. 

Why’d you write the book?

Two of us worked as visiting faculty at the US Army War College, where we grew frustrated with the relative lack of sophistication of the discussion of finance compared to that of other policy areas. A focus on finance also seemed to fit well alongside the emerging Weaponized Interdependence literature that was trying to explain the functioning of power in the modern international system.

What would you most like to change about the book, and why?

Make it an ongoing, steadily updated text. A sign of how au courant and badass we are is that every day new examples come out that could constructively be added to the text.  For example, China’s role in developing-nation debt—and especially debt renegotiations—shows classic finance domain considerations; we have an extensive discussion of similar issues in our chapter on the classical gold standard era.

More to the point, we were roughly three quarters of the way through the manuscript when Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. Out of the gate President Joe Biden declared that the United States would use sanctions to turn the ruble into rubble, and we immediately got a front-row seat to the biggest purely financial war in modern history.  We worked as much of the course of that conflict into the manuscript as the war developed, but the war still isn’t over and the financial fight hasn’t yet fully played out.  

How hard was it to get the book published?

A bit, then not so much.  Initially we expected to produce an article, but the article got very long very fast and not many journals were interested in even reviewing it. In its first iterations, we also found that readers confused our idea with established notions of economic statecraft. It took some time to fully articulate its novelty. Let it be known that desk rejections can be a blessing in disguise! 

Once we started thinking about it as a book manuscript everything rapidly fell into place; we found a publisher who was interested and supportive, and found that a lot of the ideas we had were easy to spin off into other applications.  And now that the book is available at a civilized price point, we hope that our ideas will spur additional thinking about how and why money matters for war.