The Economic Weapon

Sanctions are a favorite instrument of the American Empire and as such it is valuable to investigate their history and scrutinize their efficacy. Mulder traces the history of economic sanctions (in their contemporary incarnation) to those directed against the Central Powers in the First World War, when the war time leaders conceived of sanctions as “the economic weapon”, a means to inflict damage against the enemy without shells or mortars. As Mulder demonstrates, it is fairly difficult to gauge the effectiveness of sanctions, though he demonstrates that it is very unlikely that sanctions have worked as intended more in more than two or three limited examples, confined to now forgotten international disputes in the interwar period. Mulder traces the intellectual history of sanctions, which were simultaneously understood as a weapon with which to coerce enemies into desired by outcomes, but also by the day's liberal internationalist thinkers as a potential ‘non-violent' tool in the arsenal of diplomacy. Mulder demonstrates that sanctions have largely remained ineffective and have in fact often induced ‘bad' behavior from authoritarian militarist states who are induced ultimately to double down on illegal foreign interventions and focus on autarkic internal industrialization, state behaviors which, to this day, sanctions are deployed to try to prevent.