A dangerous tool for dangerous times ...

Nicholas Mulder's timing was perfect. The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War came out in January 2022, just in time to provide a history of how economic sanctions became the go-to response to Russian aggression against Ukraine by Europe, the US, and among their allied friends.

The book is a history of how "the economic weapon" developed into something more complex than naval blockade and siege of cities in a world of global trade connections. There was nothing "nonviolent" about the application of economic warfare in World War I. In fact, the consequences to peoples severed from the international economy were harsh and brutal.

During World War I, the Allied and Associated Powers, led by Britain and France, had launched an unprecedented economic war against the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. They erected national blockade ministries and international committees to control and interrupt flows of goods, energy, food, and information to their enemies. It was the severe impact on Central Europe and the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands died of hunger and disease and civilian society was gravely dislocated, that made the blockade seem such a potent weapon. Today, more than a century after the Great War, these measures have a different but more widely known name: economic sanctions. ... Today, economic sanctions are generally regarded as an alternative to war. But for most people in the interwar period, the economic weapon was the very essence of total war. ...

Technocratic organization had proved able to stifle all trade far more effectively than privateers and armies had in the past. Huge bureaucracies in France and Britain achieved access to banking transactions and shipping arrangements -- and they starved Germany and its allies.

So what was to become of this new weapon? The victors thought that it would be wielded by the League of Nations they founded. And they hoped that the Versailles Treaty, which penalized Germany for making war and recognized the break-up of both the old Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires, meant the end of war itself. (The Internationalists tells that story; that book offers a surprisingly hopeful take.) Aggression was be outlawed and sanctions would enforce the new international regime through the League of Nations. Mulder summarizes:

... the significance of ... economic sanctions lies in this momentous shift in the meaning of war and peace. A coercive policy that used to be possible only in time of war -- isolating human communities from exchange with the wider world -- now became possible in a wide range of situations. Commercial and financial blockade, a policy developed as a form of economic war, was reconceived as a prophylactic against war.

In the wake of the turbulent 1930s, probably the only thing casual students of history know about the League is that it failed to preserve the peace and its economic sanctions weapon proved unequal to halting the rise of European fascism and an expansionist Japanese empire. Mulder tells that story, but it is not simple. The threat of economic war influenced the planning and organization of both Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's aggressive Nazi state.

Sanctionists originally conceived of the economic weapon as a tool for keeping the peace within Europe. ... But the fact that post-World War I sanctions were usually considered against the periphery made them appear less a new peacekeeping practice than the latest disciplinary mechanism of Western empire ... [there was] limited enthusiasm for sanctions in the rest of the world ... [During the 1920s] memories of blockade loomed very large in the imagination of interwar Europeans and its renewed use against peace breakers represented a daunting threat to small nations.

... The Italo-Ethiopian War [1935-36] is often interpreted as a defeat for internationalism at the hands of fascism and imperialism. But from a strategic-material perspective it is better seen as the moment when the first major use of economic pressure drastically raised the stakes of using sanction as a tool to maintain world order. The League sanctions were seriously worrying to other revisionist states. Officials in Nazi German became convinced they would be the next target. In early 1936 a regime-wide drive began to achieve "blockade resilience" under the Four-Year Plan. Japan too started to worry about its prospects for regional autonomy. ... Over time, the seeming inevitability of economic war prompted both Adolf Hitler and the Japanese leadership to secure resources by any means necessary. ...

Mulder describes the notorious Hitler-Stalin Pact dividing up the states of eastern Europe as a preemptive strike against the sanctions weapon. It provided the context in which Germany could seize resources to make itself more resistant to economic warfare.

[Even as war seemed immanent in Europe],... Nazi ideology saw the origins of sanctions in wartime blockade as a foretaste of where these policies would eventually return. When the Swiss diplomat and League high commissioner Carl Burkhardt visited Hitler at this Bavarian summer residence on 11 August [1939], the Führer told him, "I need Ukraine, so they cannot starve us out like in the last war." Within two weeks, German diplomats had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviets, securing large deliveries of Caucasian oil and Ukrainian grain. On August 22, Hitler declared to his generals that these supplies from the East meant that "we do not have to fear blockade." ...The invasion of Poland began two weeks later.

And in Mulder's telling Japan's trajectory was also much influenced by fear of economic war. Japan's rulers believed that only economic self-isolation and self-sufficiency -- technically "autarky" -- would enable them to achieve Asia-wide hegemony.

The Imperial Army and Navy had spent years building stockpiles, providing some cushion against immediate pressure. Officer-administrators in Manchukuo [a Japanese puppet state carved from China] rhapsodized about an immanent "Eastern Autarky," based on the yen bloc's self-sufficiency in coal, iron ore, sulphur, aluminum, salt, and wood. But in the bigger scheme of things, Japan had worked itself into a precarious situation. Invasive controls had gone hand in hand with the destruction of democracy at home, while the Japanese economy was burdened by the army's unlimited and unenviable war in China. ...Conquest was not a sustainable means to autarky. ...

The wider, more efficient, and more productive economy of the United States always had the economic upper hand, despite Japan's expansionist aggression.

Mulder concludes his examination of mid-20th century economic sanctions regimes with a pessimistic and largely negative view of his subject. Sanctions have not prevented aggressive war, nor do they usually "work" against large states. They can hinder a North Korea or punish an uppity Cuba, but they do not lead to "victory." It turns out that social and cultural forces and attachments can have as much weight in human affairs as purely economic interests. He concludes:

Perhaps the most confounding aspect of sanctions is that regardless of their technical sophistication, their outcome is never a matter of economic factors alone. Interwar sanctionists assume state behavior was driven by popular opinion and the material self-interest of populations and elites. In the light of the experience of [the aftermath of] World War I, this view was dangerously single-minded. Nationalism, fear-mongering, and violent racism surged. Ideals of cultural unity, historic rights to territory, and promises of self-determination and social transformation mobilized millions of Europeans. Given the power of such ideas to move entire societies, how would economic pressure alone dissuade them from repeating such collective struggle? ...

... Economic sanctions do not project only material force; they also project political, social, and cultural values. Sanctions would no doubt work better in a world of perfectly rational, consistently self-interested subjects, but this is not the world we inhabit. Most people in most places at most times make collective choices on the basis of a wider set of considerations. The economic weapon may be a form of politics by other means. But ultimately, stitching animosity into the fabric of international affairs and human exchange is of limited use in changing the world.

Ukrainians certainly are showing there are potent forces beyond the economic. And yet -- it usually seems preferable that we at least try to pursue our antagonisms without a shooting war. But as their early advocates knew, there is nothing nonviolent about cutting a country off from the world economy.