The headline is a riff on a false quote. What Clauswitz actually wrote was that war is a continuation of policy (politics) “with other means” (mit anderen Mitteln) not "by" other means.
With that somewhat esoteric intro here is Dissent Magazine, March 4, 2022:
The History of Sanctions
Nicholas Mulder’s account of the modern economic sanctions regime sheds new light on an era of extreme destabilization and destruction.
Booked is a series of interviews about new books. In this edition, Nick Serpe talks to Nicholas Mulder, the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale University Press).
The U.S. and European responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine have generated the widest discussion and debate on economic sanctions in recent memory. Who are the targets? What are the mechanisms for implementing these policies, and can they be circumvented? What is the ultimate goal of sanctions, and how likely are they to achieve it? Could they escalate the conflict? What costs will be borne by ordinary people?
In The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, Nicholas Mulder provides a historical backdrop for these questions. In the wake of the First World War, sanctions were embraced as a potential pathway to a more peaceful international order, but they were also immersed in controversy. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the dawn of the Second World War, Mulder writes, “deaths by economic isolation were the chief man-made cause of civilian death.” His account of the sanctions regime during the interwar period sheds new light on an era of extreme destabilization and destruction, and offers much to consider for anyone troubled by how war and peace, violence and humanitarianism, and internationalism and great-power dominance are intertwined in the current moment. We spoke a month ago, in the weeks leading up to the war in the Ukraine.
Nick Serpe: Some form of economic warfare has been around since the origin of warfare itself—the siege, the blockade. What is distinctive about sanctions, and their place in the politics of war and peace?
Nicholas Mulder: The idea of applying pressure to civilian societies and economies has been around as a practice and an idea for a very long time, but it was traditionally seen as part of the repertoire of war. Sanctions lift that technique from the realm of wartime into peacetime. That’s why the birth of modern international institutions after the First World War is so important, because they really affected that switch.
Sanctions are also often confused with economic restrictions that have other kinds of political or economic purposes—things like tariffs and protectionism. We’re in an era of general increasing economic nationalism in the wake of the 2008 crash and the COVID-19 pandemic. Tariffs are a matter of domestic regulation and protecting one’s own market from foreign competition, but sanctions are about trying to influence and deprive other territories.
Serpe: In the book you discuss some of the preconditions for a world where you could conceive of a sanctions regime. Some of this is just the fact of economic globalization; some of it is about bureaucratic capacity. But there’s also an intellectual underpinning to this: a theory of individual rationality, and a theory of how a people relates to its government. Could you say more about why sanctions emerged when they did?
Mulder: Some sort of idea of a sanctions-like instrument already existed in the nineteenth century, and there was a long series of discussions about how countries could come up with a form of international policy that would stabilize interstate relations and prevent war. The yearning for perpetual peace goes back all the way to the Enlightenment. But in the nineteenth century, there wasn’t really a good solution at hand, and in reality balance-of-power politics always devolved into trying to stop war with war itself.
In the First World War, a few different things come together that make sanctions possible. One is the first great era of globalization, from 1870 to 1914—the heyday of laissez-faire liberalism and the gold standard—which provided the material conditions that made a new form of policymaking possible. Add onto that the expansion of the administrative state and its interventions and controls during the First World War and, at the same time, the advent of mass democracy with the extension of universal suffrage during the 1910s. Those are the elements you need for sanctions: states that can exploit globalization in order to influence other societies so that their popular politics allow you to avoid war. All of those things–globalization, the administrative state, and mass society—are still present, to a lesser or greater degree, and that’s why we’re still in a world in which sanctions are so omnipresent.
Serpe: There’s been a wave of recent scholarship on the League of Nations and the liberal internationalism of the interwar period that cuts against the popular belief that the League was a complete failure. What does the history of sanctions change about how we understand this period?
Mulder: In the last fifteen years, historians, international lawyers, and others who are interested in international relations have provided us with a much better grasp of the interwar League of Nations as the moment in which modern global governance was born. There are all these technical institutions, from the International Labour Organization to organizations covering public health, human trafficking, drug control, and economic policy—the antecedents of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. It’s a very rich literature. One area where it has not gone as far, however, is in its tacit acceptance of the old verdict that the League of Nations totally failed as a security institution. The Second World War is of course undeniable proof that something went very badly wrong. But there has been an implicit equation of the League’s failure with the weakness of liberal internationalism, and that is a link we have to interrogate.
When you look at the crises of the 1920s and ’30s, what you find is that internationalists struggled not with the weakness of sanctions but with their unbelievable strength. They found it difficult in the aftermath of the blockade during the First World War to use these instruments of economic pressure, particularly against larger countries, without provoking a war, and thereby having the cure be worse than the disease. This debate happens around the crisis in Manchuria in 1931—the moment that for East Asians marks the beginning of the Second World War. It comes back as fascist Italy invades Ethiopia in 1935, and then with the gradual descent into another world war in Europe. The League of Nations faced genuine political difficulties and issues of calibration as it tried to use a tool of economic coercion that in the First World War had proven itself capable of really serious effects....
....MUCH MORE
So, just to be clear, sanctions are war on a civilian population intended to force that population to execute the will of the sanctioners. Easy-peasy.
Related, the outro from March 6's "President Biden's Greatest Hope Is To Engineer An Oil Price Crash":
....2) Russia may feel provoked into war with the U.S. in the same way Japan felt provoked into war by Roosevelt in the early 1940's:
....In 1939, the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. "On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials." Under this authority, "[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted." Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, "on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere." Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt "froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan."8 The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in Southeast Asia.
Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the American leaders knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: "Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas."9....
