0:00

The economic weapon, the rise of

0:02

sanctions as a tool of modern war, is

0:04

a leading candidate for best China

0:06

talkbook of twenty twenty three. Really

0:09

good international history books are

0:11

just incredibly rare. There's

0:13

something really special about books.

0:16

That take a period of history you think

0:18

you know and give you another

0:21

layer or tool

0:23

to understand dynamics

0:26

that once you sort of apply it

0:28

to your mental model of

0:30

the time period in question, unlocks

0:33

a lot of dynamics for you and makes

0:35

things that never sat

0:37

right, fit together analytically.

0:40

And that's exactly what Nick Mulder's

0:42

first book the economic weapon did

0:45

for me about sort of

0:47

international sanctions in the first

0:49

half of the twentieth century. Nick

0:51

is a professor at Cornell and

0:53

co hosting with me today is Lars Schonander,

0:56

a policy technologist. What I'm just trying to

0:58

talk you to? So, Nick, what's

1:00

so weird about the inner war

1:01

years? And why is it so hard today to

1:03

put our heads in the minds of the actors

1:05

of that period? Well, it's a bit

1:08

deceptive because it's less than a

1:10

century ago. And in

1:12

many ways, the interwar world has a lot of recognizable

1:15

features It has relatively

1:17

modern technology. It's

1:19

very globalized. And people

1:21

have a narrative about de globalization beginning

1:24

after the first World War, as I tried to show

1:26

in the book, there was still,

1:28

in many ways, a ton of globalization going

1:30

on. In fact, I would say that the twenties and

1:32

thirties were really more globalized

1:35

than the world before world war one. There was

1:37

a huge recovery of trade and

1:39

independence in the twenties. So

1:41

that feels very current

1:44

for us right now. It it's recognizable.

1:47

But then there are all these other features that

1:49

are really distinctly different. To

1:51

name just one, most of the most

1:54

powerful countries in that period were empires,

1:56

not nation states, self determination for

1:59

most people who were not whites, not

2:01

European or European descendant, was not

2:03

to be taken for granted. And

2:06

the grand strategy discussions

2:08

are all about defending empire, not

2:11

defending alliances of sovereign equal

2:13

nation states. And on

2:15

top of that, there's whole number of other things that were

2:17

very different, but it looks

2:20

close to us in many ways, but then when you actually

2:23

start to get into the mindset of people, you realize

2:25

they were also still very much thinking

2:28

in terms of different races. Hierarchies

2:31

of of states. Some countries having

2:33

much, many more rights than others. So

2:35

those things are very confusing. So we can definitely

2:37

learn the law. From it, but we we also need to really

2:39

understand how it's distinctive and strange.

2:42

Yeah. So your book and the deluge

2:45

by Adam twos, I both had to,

2:47

like, read twice because I was like,

2:49

what? This guy's doing this? Why? And

2:51

sort of like putting all the pieces together because

2:53

of that that that sort of tension between

2:55

familiarity, the guys seem normal. When

2:58

you read them writing English, it's not like,

3:00

you know, like founders English

3:02

where there's commas and, like, f's where SS

3:04

should be and whatnot. It feels very contemporary.

3:07

But yeah, I mean, they have

3:10

civilized and barbarian nations.

3:12

They own all these territories around the

3:14

world, fascism is

3:16

a thing, which you gotta sort of like wrap

3:18

your head around. Yeah. People

3:20

who genuinely believe in communism also.

3:22

Right? So huge ideological stakes

3:24

for transforming the world. Also, in a way that

3:27

today we talk about competition, but

3:29

the US China competition is not about

3:32

a big ideological system in that way

3:34

overtaking the

3:35

world. It's about different stuff. So all

3:37

of that, you have to really get into a different mindset.

3:39

Yeah. So Pre

3:41

World War one, sanctions

3:43

weren't a thing. You

3:45

have this great anecdote where

3:47

you write that To modernize, nineteenth century

3:50

wars protected commerce and finance to agree

3:52

that is almost unbelievably generous.

3:54

During the Crimean War between Britain and Russia,

3:56

Her majesty's treasury continued to fulfill

3:58

payment obligations to the czar's government

4:00

on old loans. They're literally fighting

4:03

each other while like paying the

4:05

interest on their debt.

4:07

Nick, how does that make sense? So

4:09

there's two ways in which it was justified.

4:12

In the nineteenth century, it was mainly

4:14

in terms of liberalism and

4:17

the advance of international law.

4:19

And most people who lived in that period

4:21

felt that increasingly, there

4:23

were two different spheres in the world. There

4:25

was the world of sovereign states that were

4:27

fighting each other, that those were public entities.

4:30

And then there was a world of private individuals. And

4:33

private individuals could engage in contracts

4:36

with each other, own property, transfer,

4:38

exchange it, But the sphere sets

4:40

be kept apart. So the idea

4:42

according to people who fall out particularly

4:45

civil law systems, Napoleonic, European

4:47

continental systems was that these were just

4:50

two totally different worlds and it was even

4:52

nonsensical for a state to designate

4:54

private individuals from other countries

4:57

as an enemy. A state could only have other states

4:59

as an enemy, but no, individuals. So

5:01

the world of property in private

5:03

in the private sphere and the world of war

5:05

and statecraft and sovereignty in the public

5:07

sphere. They saw it's totally different. And

5:10

to make those two spheres connected,

5:13

they saw as something uncivilized. That would

5:15

be a breakdown of an advance that they

5:17

had thought very hard for us. That's one way.

5:20

And then the other way is a much older way.

5:22

And I'm Dutch myself. And

5:25

one of the striking things is that the Netherlands

5:27

fought an eighty year long war against the Spanish

5:29

empire to become independent. And throughout

5:31

that entire war, Dutch traders were selling

5:34

weapons and other things to the

5:36

Spanish empire that they were trying

5:38

to succeed from. And the Dutch

5:41

defended this too, and they called it the trade

5:43

with the enemy to have all the vials. And

5:45

to them, it was clearly beneficial for

5:47

them, their independence strongly,

5:49

the one thing above all, which was money. And

5:51

however, they made the money was secondary. If

5:53

you're a small state you couldn't choose the

5:55

ways that you, in their eyes, were

5:58

forced to make money or anything that

6:00

brought up money was necessary. So to

6:02

them, if the Spaniards wanted

6:04

to, you know, basically bleed

6:07

gold and bleed bullion with which they were

6:09

ultimately going to be defeated, that

6:11

was up to them. So there were all sorts of

6:13

mindsets before the early twentieth century

6:15

that could justify a trade in

6:17

in the presence of war with the enemy

6:19

actually. And

6:22

then we get to World War one. How does how do

6:24

those sort of assumptions start to break down?

6:26

Yes. Well, Walter Bond is the thing that

6:28

I think ends this world of

6:31

liberal separation is

6:34

between war and and the private

6:36

economy. And one of the main ways

6:38

that it does so is that the allies launched

6:40

this huge and unprecedented

6:43

economic blockade against Central Europe,

6:45

Germany and Austria Hungary. And

6:48

they realized that Germany particularly

6:50

is a very strong industrial export

6:52

power. So in order to undermine German strength,

6:56

it's necessary to make sure that they can't access

6:58

world markets and they can't sell into

7:00

world markets either. And this becomes the

7:02

goal of the blockade and It's that experience

7:04

of building blockade in what at that point

7:07

is the most interdependent economy

7:09

that the world has ever seen. That inspires

7:12

this idea that maybe if we hang

7:15

on to some of these policies after the war,

7:17

we can use them in order to

7:20

put pressure on countries and avoid having to

7:22

go into terrible war altogether.

7:24

Yeah. So let's stay on the sort of dynamics of

7:27

how sanctions work in World War one

7:29

in the first place. What were the tensions inherent

7:31

in the British policy? What different things were

7:33

they trying to optimize for? And what did they end

7:35

up landing on? And how effective was it in the

7:37

end? Yeah. So this system that we were

7:39

just talking about in nineteenth century where war

7:41

and commerce are separate. Many

7:44

in Britain never like that system. So Britain

7:46

actually kind of the outlier. And whenever Britain

7:48

went to war in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it always

7:50

tried to wage war on the enemy's commerce as

7:52

well. And there's even British

7:55

judges who say things like there cannot be a war

7:57

of arms at a piece of commerce. You have to

7:59

just be at war across the board.

8:01

So they never liked the separation system.

8:04

And in nineteen fourteen, they actually

8:07

have plans to do a crippling lightning

8:09

strike. On the German economy,

8:12

particularly through the city of London. So kind

8:14

of financial sanctions offensive, not

8:17

unlike what we saw with Russia actually in the spring. But

8:19

even more severe. And ultimately,

8:21

that plan runs the ground because of resistance

8:24

from British commercial interest. So companies

8:26

and banks just don't wanna do it. But

8:28

moreover, the United States would have also

8:30

been really crippled by it. So it's also pressure from

8:32

British allies. And those are actually

8:34

really the key obstacles in

8:37

the first two years of the blockade and world war

8:39

one on British economic warfare.

8:42

Their own private economy is not prepared

8:44

for us because they had been

8:46

expecting, you know, a world of ever increasing

8:48

globalization. And their

8:50

allies also want to remain neutral.

8:53

Many of them at the United States, which Britain

8:55

becomes increasingly dependent on, is a neutral, but

8:58

many of their allies are not

9:00

willing to impose similar

9:03

measures also because they feel that the Brits are gonna

9:05

use it to then have dominant position

9:07

in the world market after the war end. So they

9:09

see it as a surplptitious way for the

9:11

brits to do economic competition

9:14

in wartime so that they end up in

9:16

a better spot after the war. And it's

9:18

only after about nineteen sixteen that

9:20

the Brits and French together managed to break

9:22

that resistance.

9:23

And so Jeff, continue on that. What

9:25

was in Zander is spinning up this

9:28

type of infrastructure for the very first

9:30

time, and they lack the technology

9:32

to, for example, track how companies

9:34

operate in daily basis. What

9:36

was sort of guts of how

9:39

the British empire actually enacted

9:41

sanctions with one of the examples in your

9:43

book being trying to prevent rachel

9:45

resources from Brazil entering

9:47

Germany.

9:49

Yeah. So the first issue is knowledge.

9:51

It's actually a problem of epistemology. You

9:54

have to find a way to make

9:56

this trade that the private sector

9:58

has created in all sorts of hyper complex ways.

10:01

It's in essence grown organically visible

10:04

to policymakers. And that's actually one

10:06

of the most interesting things. And I loved doing

10:08

the research of this part of the book going through

10:10

the archives of these ministries blockade because you

10:12

couldn't see them discovering the world economy

10:15

that has emerged up to nineteen fourteen

10:18

in real time.

10:19

Let's do a little detour into manganese.

10:22

How did that get traded before World

10:24

War one? And,

10:24

yeah, what was the research process? This was such a little,

10:26

like, tour de Forks. Like, a little two page tour de

10:28

Forks. Yeah. So

10:30

the manganese is fascinating

10:33

because it's one of these, I guess,

10:35

early twentieth century rare earths. You

10:37

could kind of call it. It's an alloy

10:40

that you add to iron ore

10:42

to produce high grade stainless steel

10:44

because it helps to de oxidize steel.

10:47

So it makes it much stronger. And

10:50

people be using manganese and small quantities

10:52

from the eighteen sixties onwards. It's really a

10:55

process of the second industrial revolution,

10:58

but it is

11:00

only found in a few spots around the world. So

11:02

you find some in Latin America and Brazil,

11:05

There's some in Russia, mainly actually

11:07

in Georgia, which is also important. And

11:09

then there's some on the western coast of

11:11

India. And that's kind of it. There's some very

11:13

small deposits here and there, but Those are the

11:15

three main producers. And

11:17

what you could see in the archives were

11:20

these blockade officials going

11:22

out and talking to people in industry

11:24

and figuring out, okay, so how

11:26

vital is this material and it turns out

11:29

manganese you can do without it, but

11:31

you produce very bad quality steel.

11:33

So your military equipment just degrades

11:36

very quickly. And if you have it, then

11:38

it really helps. And you also need very small

11:40

quantities of it. So this was something

11:42

where the locator stopped. If we can find

11:45

the manganese that is entering Central Europe

11:47

and Brazil was a neutral country

11:49

for the first three years of the war. So that's where

11:51

their attention focused. Maybe we can find

11:53

a way of making sure that, you know, German war production

11:56

just lacks this really important alloy.

11:58

And that will help degrade the quality

12:01

of their military equipment. It's kind of

12:03

very much like, you know, the the arguments

12:05

you hear microchips and Russian military

12:07

equipment in the war in Ukraine.

12:10

And and and sort of another really interesting

12:12

dynamic is just how globalized that

12:15

supply chain was. You write that a single

12:17

import of raw materials from Brazil

12:19

to the world could easily involve seven

12:21

parties in six countries. Other

12:24

than the final buyers in the binding

12:26

firm, which is just a sort of incredible

12:28

thing that

12:29

really, you know, took home, I think, your point

12:31

about just how globalized. This world was hundred

12:33

years ago. Howard Bauchner: Yeah, absolutely. And

12:36

we sometimes think that supply chain

12:38

complexity is something that we have

12:40

already seen in the present in last thirty, forty

12:42

years. But if you actually dig deep

12:44

into the weeds, and I actually didn't

12:46

even go into many corporate archives.

12:48

Just a few when there was back and

12:50

forth between the bureaucracy and the corporations

12:53

or banks, for example, I could find

12:55

traces of what they were doing internally, but

12:57

you could write an entire history of sanctions

13:00

in the early twentieth century from the point of view

13:02

of the companies doing the trading. And

13:05

they're fascinating. And they are at that moment

13:07

arguably even stronger than any government.

13:09

So it takes quite a while, a few years into

13:11

the war, before the governments actually

13:13

find the laws, they find the power to

13:16

put the thumbscrews on some of these companies,

13:18

which before then were super powerful

13:20

and very influential in government

13:22

decision making too.

13:24

Quick little follow-up on this. Were there

13:26

concerns much like today about blowback

13:28

from enacting sanctions were

13:31

there discussions of, like, the twentieth century

13:33

of interdependence of if we cut up

13:35

their magnesium supplies, we'll cut they'll

13:38

cut our magnesium

13:39

supplies. Or was it

13:41

more of a similar dynamic today with the British

13:43

empire taking the place of the United

13:45

States that was so overwhelming that

13:47

there was sort of of that unfair

13:50

boundary between the sanctions in the United

13:52

Kingdom could could enact on everybody else.

13:55

It's a very specific dynamic

13:57

because the fact that the US is

13:59

not in the war for the three years is very

14:01

important. The US at that point produces

14:04

a ton of commodities and manufactured goods.

14:06

It supplies most equipment

14:08

for the French and British armies by nineteen

14:10

sixteen also in the field. So it's hugely

14:13

important for all the belligerents, but Germany also

14:15

gets to import from the United States. And

14:17

this is what ultimately causes this

14:20

tension. If you also

14:22

look at finance, for example, money

14:24

that tends to go through the small financial

14:27

centers, so the Netherlands, Switzerland.

14:30

And the management of

14:32

the blockade at that time is really about managing

14:35

neutral. So I would say it's it's

14:37

about not so much

14:39

low back as pinning countries

14:42

down diplomatically making sure that they really

14:44

do what you want them to do. But because they're

14:46

neutral, they still have their options to open. And

14:48

so that involves a a carrot and stick

14:50

game, essentially, And ultimately, allies

14:53

have a stronger hand because they have way more carrots

14:55

to offer. They also do,

14:58

however, have much stronger

15:00

stick in the form of the blockade. And

15:02

it's interesting to see, in some cases, they

15:04

they really front load the

15:06

the carrot. They really try and make

15:08

it clear, you know, you could just earn way more money. Germany

15:10

is almost out of money. Why would you sell stuff to

15:13

them? They're gonna collapse, buy

15:15

from us, to business plus. In other

15:18

cases, for example, with the Dutch, they really

15:20

start to put the screws on and reduce

15:23

what the Dutch can

15:23

import. Simply so that they don't trans

15:26

ship it. It's a journey. Right.

15:29

Let's talk about the sort of ultimate impact

15:31

this campaign. How much impact by the wars and

15:33

were these sanctions ultimately playing in

15:35

the final decision making from Germany

15:37

to end the war?

15:39

Yeah. That's a really important question.

15:41

And actually something that

15:43

is not as much discussed as it should

15:45

be partially because we lack a lot

15:47

of the good data and records. So one of the

15:49

really sad things is that in world war

15:51

two, allied bombing droids

15:54

a lot of the economic ministry archives

15:56

of the German Reich about the last

15:58

stages of the World War I. So it's kind

16:00

of a a black hole for us. Bureaucratically.

16:04

And what you can figure

16:06

out though is what the soldiers were thinking

16:08

and what was happening on the home fronts. And it

16:10

gets pretty complex, but I would just

16:12

summarize it in the following way that the

16:16

blockade puts a lot of pressure on Germany

16:19

but Germany is not as vulnerable as

16:21

Briton is for example to blockade.

16:24

And a lot of the blockade strategy is actually

16:26

almost projecting Britain's own

16:28

vulnerabilities because it got two thirds

16:30

of its food from overseas, owns

16:32

Germany. But Germany was much more

16:34

self sufficient in terms of food. And

16:36

what happened when the blockade was imposed

16:39

is that indeed, Germany lost access

16:41

to a lot of overseas imports. It had to find

16:43

substitutes. So one of the stories that

16:45

you probably know is how they invented

16:48

a synthetic nitrogen fixation. Right? A huge

16:50

breakthrough for global agriculture. The

16:52

harbor bullish process for fixing nitrogen.

16:55

But one of the other things that it did

16:57

was actually shut down their export industries.

16:59

So their export industries could no longer sell

17:01

abroad. And that releases a lot

17:03

of labor and a lot of

17:06

inputs and a lot of industrial plots

17:08

for use for

17:10

war manufacturing. So the irony

17:12

is that actually by targeting

17:14

German imports, Germany was able

17:16

to construct a more successful war economy

17:19

that if there had been no blockade, if you think about

17:21

that counterfactual, then there would have been super

17:23

hard trade off for them between putting

17:26

all your scarce labor into export

17:28

industry or putting it into war

17:30

industry. And I think they would have faced

17:32

that constraint much more quickly. Yeah. And,

17:34

like, the sort of political economy changes

17:36

if it's still possible to make money

17:39

versus if it isn't, then, you

17:41

know, what whatever sort of, like, interest

17:43

groups that would be lobbying you to keep making,

17:46

you know, nice furniture or whatever,

17:48

are not able to do that because they

17:50

have no incentive to do anything besides

17:52

make, you know, bullets and hoe land

17:55

for weed or whatever. Exactly. Yeah.

17:57

My favorite example here is the Augspork,

17:59

which is one of these old central German

18:02

cities that was known for centuries

18:04

for its pencil making, and the pencil makers

18:06

can no longer sell their pencils abroad. So they become

18:09

gunsmiths who make you

18:11

know, a a rifle to gun and

18:13

auxiliary barrels. But

18:15

depending on sort of how much money the

18:18

the German government has its disposal, it

18:20

might have been

18:21

easier. You might have been able to make more money

18:23

solving pretzels. But because that wasn't an

18:25

option, then the switch towards

18:27

a wartime footing was was probably

18:29

much more going forward. Exactly. So so

18:32

basically, the effect of the blockade is

18:34

that it makes that choice about

18:36

where to allocate your scarce labor

18:38

supply for the Germans. And

18:40

as a result, the problem that emerges

18:42

towards end of the war is a labor shortage.

18:44

It's not because of anything that the blockade

18:46

really deprives Germany of. It's because

18:49

ultimately they they have to prioritize putting

18:51

people in the field to harvest crops

18:53

and putting them in in the on

18:55

the battlefield in order to fight. And that becomes

18:58

the core source of the breakdown of morale

19:00

that beats two collapse in nineteen

19:02

nineteen. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit

19:04

about this sort of psychological impact

19:07

of sanctions. I think there's a

19:09

a really interesting dynamic that you point

19:11

to both in the World War one and sort of

19:13

thirty's context of, like, Once you're

19:15

sanctioned, you react not

19:18

necessarily the way that the

19:20

person sanctioning you hopes you hopes you

19:22

would. Yes. At

19:24

the possibility

19:26

that sanctions would backfire in that

19:28

sense, people did understand that already.

19:31

Early on. Actually, one of the first

19:33

people to warn about it was Norman Angel,

19:35

who is both a great prophet of intercontenders.

19:38

And someone who said, you know, intrepid penance can be

19:40

a force for peace. After the war

19:42

breaks out and invalidates that

19:44

possibility, he then very quickly

19:46

becomes an advocate of international blockade.

19:48

So he writes this book in nineteen fifteen

19:50

called the world's highway, kind of a

19:53

powerful metaphor, I think, also, first day,

19:55

But he, in that already, warrants that

19:58

one possible blowback effect

20:00

could be that if you start to

20:02

make access to the world economy

20:05

conditional on playing

20:08

by the rules set by one country

20:10

that's had your monarch, then other countries

20:12

might choose to pursue self sufficiency

20:14

and set because they wanna make their own rules or they

20:16

don't want to accept those rules. And so he

20:18

says that the risk might be that you end

20:20

up in this competition for self sufficing

20:23

this is what he calls it. And that actually

20:25

then buttress his nationalism and

20:27

it feeds into what calls the war. And

20:29

people at the time were definitely alive to that.

20:32

And in Central Europe, the

20:34

experience of blockade, it didn't cause

20:37

an absolute mass famine. But there were

20:39

serious starvation, and there were many people who died

20:41

of disease, weakened health, and,

20:44

you know, there's now still debate among

20:46

historians. The high estimates are definitely

20:48

not credible. But at a minimum,

20:51

we're talking about about three hundred thousand people

20:53

over the four years of the war.

20:55

Which makes BLOCADE, by the way,

20:57

the single deadliest anti

21:00

civilian weapon of the early twentieth century.

21:03

So there's no strategic bombing yet, like four

21:05

engine bombers like you have them below or two. So they

21:07

don't target civilians. There's

21:09

a low thousands casualty counts

21:11

for bombing. There's definitely chemical

21:13

weapons which are scary, but they target many soldiers.

21:16

So it's starvation by blockade. That's the

21:18

main way for civilians to

21:20

die. And as a result, this is an incredibly

21:22

scary thing. And that's one of the

21:24

things that that we need to also get back

21:26

into the mindset of the insular people

21:29

to under stand. Right? We don't think of that as

21:31

scary anymore because we know about nuclear warfare.

21:33

We know about bombing. We know about Auschwitz.

21:36

Stuff has got so much worse. Since

21:38

then. But for many people in

21:40

world war one, being located

21:43

in an interdependent world and starving to

21:45

death was the main way

21:47

that their civilians would be affected by

21:49

war. Yeah. Let's

21:51

stay on that for a second. Ophampire

21:53

or Syria, how does that play out?

21:57

There's an interesting question whether

22:00

sanctions in this period or

22:03

blockade are more damaging to

22:06

a very advanced industrial economy like Germany

22:08

or to a

22:10

simpler, more you

22:12

know, developing economy or

22:14

even mainly agrarian

22:17

economy like the ottoman empire. And

22:19

you might think that the agrarian economy

22:21

is stronger because it has more people,

22:24

focused on producing food.

22:27

It's more self sufficient. But the interesting

22:29

thing seems to be that economic complexity

22:32

is helpful when you're facing an economic siege

22:34

because it provides for inputs that are substitutable

22:37

and fungible and components. And

22:39

the Ottoman Empire doesn't have much of that. And

22:41

so in the Ottoman Empire, when they start to conscript

22:43

soldiers for their army, they're

22:46

directly taking away people who are working the

22:48

land and they don't have nitrogen fixation

22:50

like the Germans to make artificial fertilizer.

22:52

So for them, it's really crippling. And

22:54

then the Ottoman Empire is a large multi ethnic

22:57

Empire. So they mainly draw

22:59

away resources and also animals

23:01

from the Arab areas in the Middle East.

23:03

And that's where the famine is worst. And then

23:05

when you put blockade on it, it's just recipe

23:08

for mass death. So maybe half a million people

23:10

die in the blockaded areas of

23:12

of greater Syria as a result of

23:14

this. So it's an interaction between the weak of

23:16

the economy and the pressure put on a pipe location.

23:19

How much would you say is sort of bias against

23:21

the Ottoman Empire played into this

23:24

that's given they were perceived as not a

23:26

modernized powered the the entente

23:28

to simply care less about the consequences

23:31

of sanctions on the Ottomans than

23:33

it did

23:34

on the rest of the central

23:36

powers? I

23:39

definitely the other issue is, of course, also

23:41

that the Ottoman Empire totally disintegrates.

23:44

Unlike Germany. So the people

23:46

who'd suffered most were now actually part

23:48

of the French and British colonial empire because

23:50

Syria and Iraq get divided up.

23:53

By the by by Britain

23:55

and France. So the people who

23:57

were the victims of this didn't end up

23:59

having an independent state to make their case

24:01

in the interwar period. That's part of the story. And

24:03

in Germany, you do have the people

24:05

who had been hungry still

24:07

in charge of of the of the Weimar Republic.

24:10

Or living in the vibrant Republic. So that's part

24:12

of it. And the other bit is that they

24:14

were able to enforce it much more strictly,

24:17

mainly because the Ottomans didn't really have

24:19

as strong as navy that they could

24:21

threaten the blockators with, like

24:24

Germany did. They also didn't have

24:26

many submarines or mines so

24:28

that allowed a much closer, tighter

24:31

blockade, much closer to the

24:33

shore, which means it's much more difficult to evade.

24:35

In the North Sea, Germany benefits from the fact that it

24:37

has new boats and has a big battle fleet. So

24:40

the the Royal Navy needs to basically take

24:42

a much more cautious approach to locating

24:44

Germany, and they've located from much greater distance,

24:47

which means much more many more ships

24:49

can slip through. Yeah.

24:51

World War one ends in the debate around

24:54

the creation of the League of Nations. In the, you

24:56

know, first years after World War one, how

24:58

did the actors view the impact

25:00

that sanctions had and how did that play

25:02

into how they were thinking about setting up the league

25:05

to

25:06

create a better world. One

25:08

of the ironies is that I

25:11

think if we look at it now, we can see

25:13

that blockade was helpful

25:15

in winning one for one, but it was by no means

25:17

a decisive factor and its impact has probably

25:20

been overrated. But the reasons why

25:22

it's overrated are interesting because world

25:24

war one for most people in

25:26

the west was a war in which

25:28

millions of young men were sent to

25:30

a pretty senseless death in the trenches.

25:34

That was one of the reasons why blockade

25:36

was chosen as an instrument that

25:39

had less of kind

25:41

of negative association. It

25:43

seemed like maybe if we if the West

25:45

would use that in the future to fight its

25:48

wars, it would not have to waste so much

25:50

manpower. And as a result,

25:52

particularly the British start to make this argument

25:54

in the its war period that is blockade that's been decisive.

25:57

And The other important part is

25:59

that the minister who runs the book aid Robert Cessel

26:01

is the British negotiator who

26:04

crafts the foundations. During the

26:06

RSP's treaty negotiations in nineteen

26:08

nineteen. So you have two things.

26:11

The British elite has a total consensus on

26:13

blockade being the instrument that was ultimately

26:16

decisive because the comp really point to any

26:18

military breaks through the field. That's

26:20

one thing. The other thing is

26:22

that the actual economic warriors

26:25

of world war one are the people designing the

26:27

international institutions and then stopping

26:29

the international institutions like the League of Nations.

26:32

That gives you a very different view of what the league

26:34

nations was about because we have this account that

26:36

it was weak talking

26:38

shop, paper tiger. It didn't mean

26:40

much. It was just a bunch people getting together in

26:42

Geneva, whining and dining,

26:44

but not doing much of consequence

26:46

and definitely super naive about realpolitik

26:49

hard power. But if you actually look at

26:51

the bureaucrats running the economic organs

26:54

of the league and some of the staffers, they

26:56

were people who had experience

26:59

in this very new and radical

27:02

form of economic

27:02

warfare. So I would that's the starting

27:05

point for the books account of the League

27:07

of Nations. Yeah. No. It's a it's

27:09

a interesting you mentioned the atomic bomb

27:11

earlier and the the sort of

27:13

thing that occurred to me when reading that chapter

27:16

is is the parallels there actually

27:18

from a sort of like, you know,

27:20

the US, we use this weapon.

27:22

It's awful. We kill all these civilians.

27:25

But the way, you know, the people

27:27

at the time justify it to themselves is, look, we're

27:29

saving lives. We're ending the war earlier. You have

27:31

to imagine that the people in London understood

27:33

that hundreds of thousands of people were dying based on

27:35

the decisions they made around around blockade.

27:37

But, you know, what can help them sleep

27:39

at night? Is the idea that

27:41

in fact this thing, you know, really helped

27:43

end the war and sort of, you know,

27:46

it bring the world to a better place. So then,

27:48

sort of seeing it as this

27:50

new fire, as this incredibly sort

27:53

of powerful weapon makes a lot of sense

27:55

from a roundabout psychological

27:58

way. I don't know, Nick, am I am I crazy on this one?

28:00

No, absolutely. And it's attractive for

28:02

a number of ways because the people running at our civilians

28:05

not military officials. Right? They're bureaucrats,

28:07

technocrats, people who are

28:09

used to doing other sorts of policy and

28:12

real desk warriors in a way, but it's powerful

28:15

because within the British state and

28:17

within the French state too, it

28:19

gives the civilian bureaucrats major

28:22

arguments to say that it

28:24

is their instruments and their policies

28:26

that should be prioritized in the interwar period.

28:28

And that's attractive because Britain,

28:31

right, first starts world war one with a

28:33

Valencia army, a professional army, and

28:35

then halfway through the war's force to introduce conscription,

28:38

which is extremely unpopular So

28:40

it is very, very intense

28:42

on demobilizing and getting people

28:44

back into the civilian workforce as soon

28:46

as possible. Same for

28:48

France, they don't wanna maintain huge standing

28:51

armies in the interwar period. So blockade then

28:53

becomes an extremely attractive

28:56

tool that you can use at a distance. It's the

28:58

bureaucrats you already have in your government, and

29:01

you don't need to use soldiers. You simply

29:03

need to have the right bureaucratic and administrative

29:05

levers. And then you can exert

29:07

power that is the same as huge

29:09

armies essentially. So

29:12

what's interesting also is that in in the

29:14

in the early post war years, it's not just governments,

29:16

it's also labor that starts

29:18

doing these

29:19

boycotts. Can you tell the story of the

29:21

Soviet Union Poland fight and how,

29:24

you know, dock workers potentially played

29:26

a decisive role and how that ended up playing

29:28

out Yes. That's

29:30

very fascinating. And it's also

29:32

not like you said, not just a story in this

29:34

period about bureaucrats. The bureaucrats wanted

29:36

to be just about them, but The other thing

29:38

that, of course, the war does is by putting so

29:40

many people into war industry, it

29:43

gives enormous power to organize

29:45

labor, particularly in high-tech manufacturing industries.

29:48

And as a result, in every country,

29:50

right, Italy, France, Russia, but

29:52

even in Britain and the United

29:54

States, right, there's a huge strike wave after the

29:57

end of 441. And all those countries, factory

29:59

workers, factory councils, Soviet

30:02

politics, council communism becomes

30:05

possible or thinkable at least. And

30:08

that means that elites are now confronted with

30:10

this challenge because what if organized labor decides

30:12

that they want to create political

30:15

organizations, and just

30:17

shut down industries or

30:19

shut down exports to certain place. Just

30:21

we're not gonna treat these materials going to that

30:23

country or we're not as dark workers going to

30:25

load ships with weapons that

30:27

are directed against the Soviet Union. That's what,

30:30

for example, the British dock workers decide

30:32

in nineteen twenty And it's

30:34

also used in Weimar Germany. One

30:36

of the early threats to the Weimar government

30:38

is this right wing military coup in

30:40

nineteen twenty, the the cup looters.

30:43

Porch, and that's actually shut down

30:45

with the biggest general strike in history

30:47

up to that point. Just three million Germans

30:50

postal workers, telegraph workers, just

30:52

walking off the job because the social

30:54

democrats and the labor unions order

30:56

them to and it's extremely powerful because how are

30:58

you run a military dictatorship if you don't even

31:01

have telephone operators to relay

31:03

orders from the CHELTS street to the barracks.

31:05

Right? So Potentially, there's

31:07

a kind of bottom up economic weapon if

31:09

you could organize the workers in each industry,

31:12

and it's a huge moment of labor mobilization.

31:14

And ultimately, by

31:16

nineteen twenty two, twenty twenty three that

31:19

labor agitation and that that labor

31:21

power is definitely contained

31:24

and kind of hemmed it by an organized offensive

31:28

by by many governments. And

31:30

also by the recession of nineteen twenty twenty

31:32

one. So that's what the deluge write to, Spok

31:34

is great on. But, yeah, it's a

31:36

very interesting moment to think about what would have

31:38

happened if it had been workers in

31:41

old governments who had started to organize this

31:42

power, kind of, you know, build them up located,

31:45

essentially. What

31:48

was Wilson's deal? Why didn't he think

31:50

sort of moral sanctions were

31:53

gonna be what would win the day? Did

31:55

he, like, not have friends as a kid and just,

31:57

like, really wanted, you know, like, like,

31:59

just, like, thought this was more important for

32:02

him. I don't know why he overweights this sort of

32:04

thing so much. It's interesting.

32:06

I mean, I I also still

32:08

find Wilson a very puzzling

32:10

figure and, you know, people

32:12

have said also to think about growing up in the

32:14

south after the civil war and

32:17

that that's what shapes a lot of his views. I

32:19

think he resists

32:22

entering over one for long time,

32:24

but you can really see

32:26

reading his papers and his communication with

32:28

other heads of state is a big

32:30

switch around the moment when he does

32:32

decide to go to war. And it it really changes

32:35

something about him from then on he

32:37

is entering the war with an objective

32:40

to spread and impose peace

32:42

on all the parties. And also,

32:45

he actually outlines this very

32:47

strongly moral and political agenda

32:49

for what countries need to do to get

32:51

out of the blockade, so to have the blockade lifted.

32:54

Which he says is actually no longer an

32:56

automatic thing if there's a peace treaty.

32:59

And this is also a a big change from

33:01

the eighteenth century. Right? Blockators

33:03

of wartime instrument. You can impose it when

33:05

you go to war. But when the war ends, you have to lift

33:07

it. And what happens after BOFR one is

33:09

actually that the allies keep the blockade against Germany

33:12

going for quite a while longer.

33:14

They keep it blockade against Soviet Russia

33:16

going because they don't recognize the Soviet government

33:18

as legitimate, so they use that sort of gray area

33:20

to keep it going. They use it against Hungary

33:23

when there's a Soviet uprising there. So

33:26

they start to play around with

33:28

the boundaries of war and peace, and Wilson is the first

33:31

one say, you know what? I don't really

33:33

feel like lifting the blockade

33:35

against Germany unless they overthrow

33:37

the Kaiser. Unless Germany goes from being

33:39

a military adpire to democracy or

33:41

a republic, I don't really want to admit

33:43

them into the global

33:45

economy. And that becomes in a

33:47

way also I think it's the first time

33:50

that someone consciously articulates

33:52

what you might call a regime change

33:55

goal for economic pressure saying, this

33:57

government needs to change its internal constitution

33:59

and political character in order to

34:02

have this economic containment lifted.

34:06

Just dive into that bit more. Would you say

34:08

this is the sort of origin

34:10

story to one of the problems with sanctions

34:12

that we see today that they're

34:15

way easier to enact on

34:17

the

34:17

spot, but actually unwinding them

34:19

is a far more logistically complicated

34:22

process than just enacting them

34:24

this place? Yes. That's

34:27

a very important point. There's a

34:29

real path dependence. And

34:31

like you or both sides are saying a real political

34:33

economy to sanctions. Once you impose

34:36

them, interests form

34:38

around the sanctions regime that you've just

34:40

created. And lifting it

34:42

becomes a complicated political thing where oftentimes

34:45

the groups that have an interest in maintaining it

34:47

can be for strategic but often for just commercial

34:50

reasons. Start to put

34:52

pressure to keep it there.

34:54

And in nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen,

34:56

you could already see this because the chemical

34:58

industry in the United States and the pharmaceutical industry,

35:01

they have the German pharmaceutical

35:03

and chemical industry, which is the leading in

35:06

in the world in the early twentieth century.

35:08

It's absolutely world class. The Americans

35:10

are still they're they're

35:13

good. That they're little behind the Germans,

35:15

but what they now have is this wartime

35:17

law, the trading with the enemy act

35:19

that's confiscated all the patents. That German

35:22

companies had in their U. S. Subsidiaries,

35:24

including for really important stuff like

35:26

aspirin, like Bayer loses

35:28

its aspirin patent. And DuPont

35:30

Chemical, American Pharmaceutical

35:32

Corporations.

35:33

Like telecom stuff too. Right? They're

35:35

all these, like Exactly.

35:37

So so there's Marconi. There's all these radio

35:40

and telecom stuff. So actually, it's

35:42

kind of interesting. Right? Talking about ceiling IP,

35:45

economic war can give you a way to

35:47

take patents. And crucial IP and

35:49

then just lift yourself

35:51

one leg up in in technological

35:53

competition against an adversary. And

35:56

the people who've studied this, Katherine Steen,

35:58

has a great book on the US

36:00

chemical industry in the interwar period.

36:02

That's basically all about its competition

36:04

and compensation of

36:07

German technology. And

36:09

it's very clear that without World War

36:11

one and the economic war that

36:13

it involved, the US pharmaceutical chemical

36:15

industry would never have achieved the

36:18

position it ended up having by the thirties

36:20

and forties. They really managed

36:22

to use it to to leap ahead. Massively.

36:24

But then if you look at other interests in the US,

36:26

there are plenty of American commercial interest

36:28

that want to, of course, restart trade with Germany

36:31

as soon as possible. So manufacturing, shipping

36:33

trades, Siemens, etcetera, unions.

36:36

They're very much in favor of listing book as soon

36:38

as possible. So there's a very complex landscape between

36:41

you know, the more inward focus American

36:43

nationalist industries and the more American

36:45

international industries.

36:47

So so you have a point, I think this was in the

36:50

nineteen twenties where the US Chamber of Commerce

36:52

proposes just like strengthening boycott power

36:54

to wipe out human chrism without a trace.

36:57

And, you know, on one side, you have the

36:59

American Chemical and pharmaceutical

37:02

companies who just have all these cool patents and wanted

37:04

to sell drugs without any problem, but the National

37:06

Association of Manufacturers called the boycott

37:08

idea. Quote, not only futile,

37:10

but vicious, and the International Siemens

37:13

Union of America also for obvious reasons

37:15

rejected it. So you know, the the sorts

37:18

of, like, who wins, who loses when you have

37:21

big anxious debates with

37:23

with major powers is something that I think will

37:25

be with us forever.

37:27

Absolutely. Yeah. I

37:29

wanna come to the nineteen twenties in this

37:31

idea of positive sanctions. Where,

37:34

you know, the the whole NATO for trade

37:36

idea, I guess, has its intellectual

37:39

origins. So what was the idea

37:42

of sort of pairing support with

37:44

the aggrieved party with

37:46

sanctions on the aggressor. And

37:49

why did it not seem to get a lot of traction?

37:51

The nineteen twenties. When you did have, you know, all

37:53

this stuff like the Kellogg Breonna pack

37:55

and this this whole sort of, like, global

37:58

motivation it seemed to try to, you know,

38:00

give the Legum Nations a second shot and put more

38:02

put more juice into the initial formulation of

38:05

the international organization?

38:06

Yes. So the blockade

38:08

was one part of the

38:10

economic governance that went on

38:12

during what or what. But there was another

38:15

area where a huge amount of international

38:18

institution building took place, and that was in

38:20

organizing the logistics. And some of

38:22

the most important like Jean Monet,

38:25

one of founders of the European Union later

38:27

on in the twentieth century is

38:29

running the Allied

38:31

Maritime shipping council together

38:33

with Arthur Solter, who's a Brit who then becomes

38:35

the head of the League of Nations economic section.

38:38

So all of these international bureaucrats

38:41

cut their teeth on the challenge of

38:43

organizing shipping space,

38:45

right, getting all the tonnage there, which is super

38:47

important when you have German u boat sinking five

38:49

hundred to six hundred thousand tons every month.

38:52

Right? It's about producing, but it's also

38:54

about finding the neutral countries that

38:56

are still willing to trade. So Norway,

38:58

for example, becomes

39:00

very important. But Dutch ships as well

39:03

all over the world. And managing

39:05

those sources, making sure that the grain

39:07

harvest from Australia arrives in

39:09

Britain in time in a convoyed setting

39:14

and also the Wharf and Ads, so the American

39:16

loads from Wall Street reach the British Treasury

39:18

before it runs out of money. All of that

39:21

is an experience that these people carry into

39:23

the negations as well. So

39:26

the idea that you then get is

39:29

that mainly small countries and

39:31

Finland is key in this. Poland also

39:33

plays a role. And probably the other

39:35

biggest advocate of this sort of positive economic

39:38

weapon, as they start to call it, is France.

39:40

The French like this, of course, because they

39:42

are one of the weaker allies

39:45

financially. They're stronger than Italy, but

39:47

they're weaker than Britain and the United States.

39:50

And so the French also have

39:52

another bird to carry, which is they have a whole

39:54

bunch of eastern European newly

39:56

independent countries in the nineteen twenties to

39:58

support as your allies, the so called little on top.

40:01

And France takes it upon itself to

40:03

start campaigning for a kind

40:05

of positive support

40:08

logistical apparatus. The first

40:10

time they put it forward is in the early twenties during

40:13

the attempt to pass this new treaty called

40:15

the Geneva protocol. In twenty

40:17

four. And what they essentially wanna do is

40:19

as soon as there's an aggressor

40:21

that is designated, a a new war breaks out,

40:24

the aggressor gets league of nation

40:26

sanctions imposed against it, and the victim

40:28

gets this huge lump

40:31

of money and logistic support from all the members

40:33

of the league and that there will be a kind of permanent

40:35

bureaucracy to organize the

40:37

food supply, the weapons,

40:39

the finance flow against that country. So

40:41

that all this expertise at doing war

40:43

logistics and war finance will be preserved.

40:46

But in order to aid the victim from the

40:48

get go, and to make sure that

40:51

the common the common front against aggression is

40:53

as strong as it could be. And so that's the

40:55

initial plan. And then it's actually

40:57

turned into a a convention in the late

40:59

twenties called the convention for financial assistance.

41:03

James is a huge proponent. You won't be surprised,

41:05

right, the guy who is all that economic stimulus.

41:08

And himself have been doing more finance than what

41:10

we're won. So Joe Maynard Keynes is massive

41:12

proponent, but there's quite a lot of fit in Sears

41:14

private bankers in the city of London who think

41:16

this is a great idea. Because for them,

41:19

it's still much better for their business to

41:21

led the bunch of money to a poor Eastern European

41:24

country that's being invaded than to

41:27

go through the entire experience of mobilizing

41:29

the British economy for war with all of its controls

41:31

and interventions again. So to them,

41:34

sending money is always a better choice

41:36

than accepting a full

41:38

blown war economy. And that's that explains

41:40

why the private sector particularly the city of London

41:42

is quite keen on it. But there ultimately

41:44

the problem that it runs into is that most

41:47

of the governments this civilian governments,

41:49

the people in the ministries of finance in

41:51

the late twenties and early thirties, are

41:53

still very much in the grips of this balancing

41:56

the budget. Mindset. Their Austrians,

41:58

they want to make sure that

42:01

the size of government economic is trimmed

42:03

out. And putting

42:06

your your card down for an

42:08

essentially unlimited supports facility

42:12

for small countries that might be activated any

42:14

moment when a war breaks out of Eastern Europe, which

42:16

they think could be any moment. That to them

42:18

seems to just be a recipe for becoming

42:21

insolvent very quickly. And being

42:23

on the hook for other country's defense in a

42:25

way that they don't want. So it's ultimately the

42:27

the kind of financial and fiscal

42:30

orthodoxy of that of the period

42:32

that ends up destroying this idea

42:34

of a positive economic weapon. And I would

42:36

describe it, Jordan, you said a

42:38

a NATO for trade. I would describe

42:41

it slightly differently as sort of IMF

42:43

for geopolitical crises. Because

42:46

it's really it doesn't matter what sort of country

42:48

you are. You don't have to be a democracy you don't

42:50

have to be like

42:53

President France. You could be, you know, Romania,

42:56

a pretty nasty anti Semitic

42:58

monarchy. But if Soviet if this over union

43:00

invades you, you're going to, as a league of patients member,

43:02

get all this support. So

43:05

I would say it's kind of politically and ecologically

43:07

blind it's it's an IMF for

43:09

for geopolitical

43:10

crises. Yeah. Interesting. I was

43:13

googling around about this at j store and

43:15

found a speech from December nineteen

43:17

thirty from someone talking at the Chatham

43:19

House saying that the convention on financial

43:21

assistance was, quote, a ridiculous convention

43:24

for the financing of other people's wars.

43:26

Which, you know, tough sell

43:29

during a great depression. Right?

43:31

It is a sort of dynamic that ends up really

43:33

biting the proponents of the sort of the nation's

43:35

backed international structure in the

43:38

back when we get to the

43:41

Italy, Ethiopia War, which we will come to in

43:43

a second. Because I also wanna ask about

43:45

this sort of ideological debate around

43:49

food. And whether or not food

43:51

stuffs should be something that

43:53

is okay to ban another country

43:55

from receiving. It's it was really interesting because,

43:57

like, you had Hoover who did the

44:00

Belgian relief after World

44:02

War one. And, you know, he's just like

44:04

this engineer. He's fairly American. Like,

44:06

he wants to do good and like have common

44:08

sense solutions or whatever. Yeah. And,

44:10

you know, he he tries to propose to France

44:12

and the UK, like, maybe it's

44:14

a bad thing for us to, you know,

44:17

starve people. And he gets a

44:19

a pretty root awakening

44:21

from his

44:22

allies. So what was the what was dynamic there.

44:24

So the US is

44:27

a neutral country for much of World War one.

44:29

And there are people like Hoover

44:32

who participate in the war alongside

44:34

Wilson, but very quickly use it as a

44:36

a jumping off point for their own careers.

44:39

And I do think Hoover is probably one of

44:41

the most underrated and interesting early

44:43

twentieth century American figures. Definitely,

44:45

as a president, right, has

44:48

a reputation rightly for

44:50

presiding over huge economic catastrophe, but

44:53

everything he was doing up to then probably

44:56

made him the most important American internationalist

44:58

period, exactly self

45:01

made millionaire, has lots

45:03

of technical know how, has

45:05

lived abroad for a long time, has friends

45:07

in every single continent, you know, in China,

45:09

in Finland, in Australia. He's

45:12

much less parochial than most of the sort of

45:14

waspalid he's this freewheeling quaker

45:18

science guy, you know? And

45:21

like you said, he is a huge hero

45:23

in much of Europe. He

45:25

organizes the relief of Belgium, also

45:27

the relief of Central Europe. So in Central

45:29

Europe, in in Austria and

45:31

Hungary, he's a huge hero

45:34

and the famine relief even for the Soviet

45:36

Union. So he has this pretty interesting

45:39

idea that even though he is absolutely

45:41

opposed as a conservative to communism. It's

45:44

much better to feed people with radical

45:46

ideologies because then you just sort of pacify

45:49

them. You make sure that they see

45:51

politics as a less existential matter. You

45:53

kind of calm their tempers and then ultimately

45:56

use to show that Capitalism is just

45:58

too great. There why would you want to do anything that

46:00

upsets your access to this great world

46:02

of plenty and technology? And

46:04

that's his he's really self confident, and you're right,

46:07

like kind of coffee and American about

46:09

it, but it does work. Right? He does

46:11

do this release pretty successfully and

46:14

definitely a lot of people also believe

46:16

in the Uber hype. And at

46:18

that moment, he becomes important

46:21

in the late twenties. Once he becomes president,

46:24

he's elected in twenty eight, and

46:26

the League of Nations at that point is deciding

46:29

whether its sanctions should include food. And this

46:31

has been a board of contention throughout

46:33

the twenties feminist organizations, for

46:35

example, very interestingly, are very

46:37

active in lobbying for an exemption

46:40

of carve outs in sanctions that would

46:42

exempt food from being targeted

46:44

with sanctions so that women and children can

46:47

continue to have access to to food

46:49

stuffs. But

46:50

weren't there some like really hardcore feminist

46:52

organizations that were on the other side of this too?

46:54

I thought that was great. Exactly. mean,

46:56

you know, the instills as if feminist organizations

46:59

were only humanitarian, there were also exactly,

47:01

you know, nationalist, feminist, or

47:04

if if you want, total war of feminist. And

47:06

actually, the Soviet bankers, so

47:09

some of the bankers family were were

47:11

very much on this side of

47:13

the argument. So they were even criticizing CECL

47:15

the blockade minister for going insufficiently

47:18

far to destroy Germany in the war. So

47:20

definitely the position on that part of

47:22

the politics is as complex as anywhere else.

47:24

The argument in favor of food sanctions is just

47:27

any carve out is going to weaken the impact

47:29

of sanctions. And

47:32

the whole point of sanctions according

47:35

to the sanctionists. That's

47:37

what they're called at the time. So I used the term a lot

47:40

in the book because that was what people called them and

47:42

they called themselves that also. The

47:44

sanctionists make this argument that

47:46

if you want blockade to really preserve world

47:49

peace or sanctions to preserve world peace,

47:51

as a peacetime form of blockade, you need

47:53

them to be as total and

47:56

unsparing as possible. Any

47:58

carve out is going to weaken their deterrent effect

48:00

going to make sure that the speed economy

48:02

can keep running. And therefore,

48:04

the best kind of sanctions, our total ones,

48:07

only if you threaten everyone with death by

48:09

starvation, will they actually have this sort of frustrating

48:11

effect on popular opinion? So

48:14

they they actually, you know, consistently and

48:16

I think you have to understand from their point of view there

48:18

is logic to this argument too. Right? That

48:20

they saw themselves as the real pacifist. But that

48:22

in order, it's kind of escalated to deescalate.

48:25

You need to have the most inhumane measures

48:27

in order to preserve peace. That's, of course, very familiar

48:29

with nuclear deterrence. Nuclear

48:32

strategy. But it's already an argument made

48:34

in the twenties about why you should never have

48:36

food carve outs for sanctions. Howard Bauchner:

48:39

So let's talk

48:41

about two of the sort

48:43

of examples on the positive side of the

48:45

ledger. Bulgaria and Greece as

48:47

well as this this

48:49

were in Latin America. So how did sanctions

48:51

play out in those two

48:53

contexts? And what impact did it

48:55

had in preventing escalation?

48:57

Yes. So the the original theory

48:59

in an interwar period seems to

49:01

be the one of the sanctions, which

49:03

is a deterrence theory. So you just threat

49:06

to use sanctions, and then any country in its

49:08

right mind is going to stop whatever aggressive thing

49:10

it's doing in order to avoid being

49:12

put under this crippling blockade. And

49:15

it works for the first time of the fall of

49:17

nineteen twenty one when Yugoslavia in

49:20

the kind of uncertain border

49:22

adjustments in the Balkans

49:24

tries to grab a bunch of Albania

49:27

and actually put Albania on her influence.

49:29

Lloyd George, who's the British prime minister

49:31

still goes out in

49:33

front of the world press and says,

49:36

we're gonna put Yugoslavia under a

49:38

blockade with an Article sixteen sanctions

49:40

procedure of the league. And very quickly,

49:43

they sought their armies and they negotiate

49:46

an an effective settlement to

49:48

the border issue between the albanian obvious.

49:50

So that's success number one. Success number

49:52

two is this war known as the

49:55

War of the Stray dog, one of the best

49:57

interwar wars for its

49:59

name, but also because it is

50:01

another success for

50:03

the league of nations as a peacekeeping organization.

50:06

And it's very similar.

50:08

There's a border skirmish that breaks out to Greece

50:10

in Bulgaria in October nineteen twenty five.

50:13

They start to mobilize their armies, and Greece is then

50:15

under a pretty nasty military dictator, Pangolos.

50:18

He tries to use this to unify

50:20

the Greek society behind him and starts to really prepare

50:22

for a big time invasion of Bulgaria. Bulgaria

50:25

seems weak as if it was on the losing side of World War one.

50:27

It has a very small army, so this seems ideal

50:30

and Greece has suffered this big defeat by being kicked

50:32

out of the Ottoman Empire

50:34

out of Asia Minor, a few years before says looking

50:36

to restore its military prestige.

50:40

And the league intervene that says to Pangettos,

50:42

if you go ahead with this invasion, we're going to

50:44

put Athens on our blockade, that had

50:46

already happened in Wilbur one also. And

50:49

at to Greece suffered pretty severely

50:51

from from blockade. And then again, the brick weeks

50:53

back down. So success number two for the

50:55

league. And these are kind of important and

50:58

it's important to give the league of nations credit for this

51:00

because a lot of the IR influenced

51:02

diplomatic history this period had just

51:04

almost overlooked these cases because they

51:06

saw sanctions as being only about use

51:09

and imposition. And if you have

51:11

this very realist understanding

51:13

of sanctions, only when you use sanctions, can

51:15

you assess if they work? But that actually wasn't

51:17

at all the way that people in the age of war period thought

51:19

about it. They thought the threat was enough. So

51:21

you have to think about cases and look at

51:23

cases where sanctions were threatened and if

51:25

that managed to deescalate things, that's clearly success

51:28

for sanctions. Right? And it's great because no

51:30

people had to starve to death in order for

51:32

peace to be preserved. So

51:34

that's part of the way in which

51:37

I think looking at sanctioning this period

51:39

forces you to take the legal nations more seriously and

51:41

to give it credit actually for diffusing

51:44

a bunch of diplomatic

51:46

crises that could have escalated badly. Because

51:48

so so let's remember. Right? World War one starts with

51:50

some stuff in the Balkans that they want his attention

51:52

to And the next thing you know, it's the worst war

51:55

that we the world's ever seen. So

51:57

that's success number two. And

52:00

then in the thirties, there's a

52:03

the worst war of the twentieth century in Latin America,

52:05

the Chaco war that breaks out between Paraguay and

52:07

Bolivia. And then there

52:09

is an international arms of Barco that

52:12

ultimately also plays a role in

52:14

making sure that these countries sue

52:16

for peace and they manage to

52:18

constrain it. So that's a pretty

52:20

significant thing. Also, the United States

52:22

also joins in that because it's organized outside

52:24

of the league, but the league as a forum

52:26

for negotiation plays an important role. Yeah.

52:29

So there's some real successes

52:31

of both actually using sanctions

52:33

and threatening sanctions. What's

52:37

the deal with IR scholars? mean,

52:39

that's not like an enormous leap that you

52:41

made. Right? Nick is like, yeah,

52:43

we should think about the times that sanctions

52:46

were threatened. I like tried to write

52:48

my college thesis ten years ago about

52:50

the sort of early history of sanctions. And

52:53

the secondary literature was just so bad.

52:56

That I kind of gave up and did it on something

52:58

else. Is

53:00

this just not a topic that's gotten a

53:02

lot of attention? Or

53:04

why has thinking been so

53:06

facile about

53:08

this sort of stuff? I

53:11

think mainly because in

53:13

IR, there's not an

53:15

appreciation for what the worst possible

53:17

thing to happen to your society was

53:19

in the import period. And this

53:21

is before people had seen the effects

53:24

of four engine strategic firebulbing

53:26

on cities or those sorts of things. It

53:28

was economic blockade because

53:30

people were aware of their interdependence, and

53:33

they had seen it over one. Everyone had

53:35

seen how the allies the

53:38

unsolved had worked together to

53:40

in their eyes, right, even though we just talked

53:42

about why the it was actually more complicated. In

53:44

their eyes, the unsolved star

53:46

of the world's most quickly

53:49

rising sophisticated industrial power,

53:51

Germany is sufficient. That was

53:53

the lesson many people took from Uruguay. So

53:55

even the most powerful country in the world can be

53:57

brought to its knees with this instrument. Let

53:59

alone that a bunch of small Balkan

54:02

countries that are under financial supervision

54:04

and have huge refugee problems

54:08

are able to resist this. Obviously, they couldn't do

54:10

it for very long. So that was the

54:12

major experience, and

54:14

it's a very distinctive interwar experience.

54:17

And I, you know, I think you could really talk about

54:19

it as the specter of blockade. It hangs

54:21

over everyone

54:23

because the League of Nations makes it the prime instrument

54:26

with which it preserves peace, the efforts to

54:28

do major disarmament, don't go

54:30

anywhere. The United States and

54:32

the Britain, the major hedgebals, reduced

54:35

the size of their armies, but they also imposed

54:37

treaties on Germany and other countries to reduce their

54:39

army, so military power, is temporarily

54:42

less relevant, and maybe also that we

54:44

associate deterrence theory with nuclear weapons.

54:46

But there are clear cases of

54:49

anti civilian weapons like blockade

54:52

being used in this way. So I think we should

54:54

banditurance theory and think about it much

54:56

more broadly in non nuclear settings

54:59

as

54:59

well. Free nuclear history.

55:02

The specter of blockade, I think,

55:05

is something that makes this sort of

55:07

drive towards a tawke, both from

55:09

Japan and and and Nazi Germany

55:11

make a ton of sense. But the piece you argue

55:13

that really clicks that into place is

55:15

the most dramatic use of sanctions in the

55:18

nineteen thirties. On Italy, which we're gonna

55:20

come to now. But, yeah,

55:22

we're gonna do one more thing before it. So

55:25

almost fought a war with Germany over

55:28

Austria?

55:29

Excuse me? Yes. So

55:32

this is one of the things also that we

55:34

have difficulty wrapping our heads around because of

55:36

course, we see World War two through the prison

55:38

of the Axis. We just know who we

55:40

won the war against, who were the bad guys, who

55:42

were the fascists, who were united of the Axis.

55:45

But that misses a whole part of the

55:47

very complex diplomatic history of the thirties

55:49

where it wasn't by any means clear that

55:52

that was the way that this anti

55:54

liberal, fascist alliance would align.

55:58

And both Japan and Italy could have gone quite

56:00

differently there. I think it's important to really think counter

56:02

factually about what causes

56:05

Cohort two to break out as it does. And

56:08

in the case of Italy, one of the major

56:10

reasons why Italy was

56:12

not, by any means, an automatic partner for Germany,

56:14

was that Italy had fought on the side of the insides.

56:16

It will hurt what? So there's already a

56:18

very clear less than two decades

56:20

earlier precedent for Italy

56:23

being a liberal country, signing up on the

56:25

side of the allies. And sure Musa Lidhi is a fascist,

56:27

a radical nationalist, empire builder.

56:30

But he is also someone who has a very

56:32

liberal financial policy. He

56:34

is praised widely by the

56:36

economists when he comes to power.

56:39

But there's very good work. Right?

56:41

Wall Street and American governments throughout the

56:43

twenties and thirties see Musilini as our guy

56:45

in Italy. Because he's the one who keeps communism

56:47

under control. He organizes

56:50

Italy, and he's the sort of authoritarian

56:53

leader that the West could do business with. So

56:55

there's very much the expectation that if

56:58

it comes to it, Italy

57:00

will align with the west hopefully. And if

57:02

that isn't the case, then maybe we can arrange

57:04

some sort of deal about colonial territory

57:07

in Africa and just buy and leave off.

57:08

So

57:11

people do, I think, did see at that

57:13

time that the main threat was Germany. And the

57:15

the key question I think that they were clear about

57:17

and that that you have to

57:19

understand is, How do you build an anti German

57:21

containment alliance? How do you prevent Germany

57:23

from becoming what it was

57:26

still the most laserly powerful country in

57:28

Europe? And Italy is

57:30

a key part of that puzzle, Russia, the Soviet

57:32

Union, or also. And so that makes this

57:34

very complex in the thirties. Will

57:36

Musolini, despite being a fascist,

57:38

be our fascist, and

57:41

will the Soviet Union, which is anti liberal,

57:44

Nonetheless, be on the side of the liberal

57:46

powers because it joins the League of Nations in nineteen

57:48

thirty four. That's another hugely important thing. And it

57:50

actually has this formist or Livevino,

57:53

who's very pro Western

57:55

and joins up with Britain and France and all sorts

57:57

of initiatives. So potentially, right, we

57:59

could just recreate the alliance that one over

58:02

one. You just have Russia and the east,

58:04

Italy and the south, and then Britain and France

58:06

and the west. And you there's no way that Germany

58:08

would win

58:08

that. So how come that we could it recreate

58:10

that deterrent alliance in the thirties?

58:13

That's I think the big question. I love

58:15

this sort of like Soviet Union like,

58:17

real eagerness to get into these wars, they have

58:19

nothing to do with and be like, yeah, we're on the

58:21

side of, like, international peace and stability.

58:23

Can you talk a little bit more more about this? Who is

58:25

this

58:26

guy? And why do you think the Soviet

58:28

Union showed so much verb in

58:30

some of these sanctions efforts in the thirties?

58:33

So it's probably combination of things, but

58:35

one of them is definitely that style it needs

58:37

there to be international peace while he's

58:40

transforming and collectivizing the Soviet Union.

58:42

So he is rearming massively.

58:45

Also, he's obviously not a peace loving,

58:47

trusting idealist

58:50

in IR terms. He is absolutely

58:53

ready for capitalist betrayal and

58:55

perfidy at any moment. The imperialist powers

58:58

he's convinced will eventually could

59:00

aspire to crush Russia. But if

59:02

he can have treaties to keep friendly

59:04

relations with them while he tries to,

59:06

you know, in his own words do with

59:09

Russia, In ten years, what it took the

59:11

west hundred and fifty years to do namely industrialize

59:13

and become a major industrial power with an army

59:16

that can resist them then he'll take

59:18

it. So as part of that, he switches the

59:20

official strategy also of the communist parties

59:22

in the thirties around as porting

59:25

peace, the popular front strategy fits in with

59:27

this, had these tactical alliances

59:29

with social democrat and socialist parties in

59:31

the west, even though they're no communist and kind of

59:33

anti Soviet. And he

59:35

supports this, and he enters the League of

59:37

Nations. And the other major

59:39

reason why that seems attractive is, of course, Russia

59:41

does have a bunch of commodities. So it is a major

59:43

oil producer. It has lots

59:46

of iron ore manganese, all that stuff,

59:48

grade from the Ukraine, wood,

59:51

all sorts of materials. So if you get

59:53

the Soviet Union into the league as

59:55

a major resource control alliance,

59:57

that too will strike transactions.

1:00:01

Back to So in sort of

1:00:03

nineteen thirty four, thirty five, Muesolini gets

1:00:05

really stressed at Hitler

1:00:07

thinking that he's gonna do Anshiluz and and

1:00:10

and Muesley's not super comfortable with

1:00:13

NASA Germany expanding into Austria on

1:00:15

Italy's border, but that eventually gets resolved.

1:00:18

And, you know, he decides that he

1:00:20

wants some bites out of the African continent.

1:00:23

You get this fascinating tension

1:00:25

that you set up I think really well in the book

1:00:28

of the League of Nations deciding

1:00:30

whether they were gonna turn a blind

1:00:32

eye to what Italy was doing in Ethiopia

1:00:35

in order to get them on the side of of

1:00:38

what was seeming to be real momentum behind

1:00:41

more aggressive controls on exports

1:00:43

to Nazi Germany or sort

1:00:45

of standing up for Will Sonia and Principles.

1:00:48

And defending poor high velocity in

1:00:52

in in Ethiopia. So take us back to that

1:00:54

moment, Nick. What were the dynamics and how did it end

1:00:56

up playing out? The hypothetical alliance

1:01:00

that could have emerged at this

1:01:02

point is one that in early

1:01:04

nineteen thirty five meets

1:01:07

at a small Italian town called Streisar, and

1:01:09

it comes to be known as the Streisar front

1:01:11

in the international media. It's

1:01:13

British, the French, the Italians, and the Soviets.

1:01:16

And they propose a plan

1:01:18

to deprive Nazi Germany of key

1:01:22

inputs for its weapons industry. Particularly

1:01:25

minerals and iron ore, these

1:01:27

sorts of things. And they

1:01:29

have a very good plan laid out

1:01:32

the French are particularly keen to have the

1:01:34

Italians in, but Soviet

1:01:36

Union is now part of it. So they're both also

1:01:38

those four countries are the four permanent members of the

1:01:40

league of nations. Council, so the equivalent to

1:01:42

the security council today. So they Germany

1:01:45

is already left. The Nazis are out. Japan

1:01:47

is out, but the Soviet Union has joined

1:01:49

council. So now the four council powers potentially

1:01:51

could just impose crippling power sanctions

1:01:54

on Germany if it does anything, like, reintroduce

1:01:56

conscription or which it had just done

1:01:58

or go and take the Rhineland, minutes

1:02:01

arise, etcetera. That's one

1:02:03

of the possibilities. But at the same time,

1:02:05

Mussolini wants to build his empire

1:02:07

in Africa. He's also suffering at home from

1:02:09

crippling unemployment. He wants to put a target

1:02:11

to work. He wants to restore national prestige, and he

1:02:13

needs to keep the regime going before

1:02:16

Italian actually become too

1:02:18

restive and potentially here's domestic

1:02:20

trouble brewing for him. So

1:02:22

he's still very committed to some imperial expansion

1:02:25

and Italy has this sword

1:02:27

wound from being defeated in the eighteen nineties

1:02:29

when it tried to conquer Ethiopia. It still has

1:02:31

Eritre and Somalia. And mussolini

1:02:34

decides, I'm gonna go back in and

1:02:36

try him conquer what liberal Italy

1:02:38

couldn't do in the eighteen nineties. So he begins

1:02:41

to arm for a war in

1:02:43

Africa send huge numbers of troop

1:02:45

transports through the Suez Canal to

1:02:47

Eritrea and Somalia to really crush

1:02:49

Ethiopia and a pincher movement from both

1:02:51

North and and East. And

1:02:53

this puts the league of nations in a very difficult

1:02:56

spot, and particularly Britain and France

1:02:58

because either they accept

1:03:01

this platedly imperial power

1:03:04

grab war of aggression against the sovereign

1:03:06

African member state of League of Nations, one

1:03:09

of the only League of Nations member states in Africa.

1:03:12

Either they accept that and they basically throw

1:03:14

all principles of the League of Nations under bus

1:03:16

to keep the Alliance against Jeremy going.

1:03:18

Or they say

1:03:20

no, you could not do that. They stand

1:03:22

up for the integrity of territory to

1:03:24

offend Ethiopia's rights as a league member

1:03:26

states, but then they lose one of the

1:03:28

four council members and they lose a

1:03:31

key pillar of the anti German

1:03:33

alliance in Central

1:03:35

Europe. And potentially, they lose control of what

1:03:37

happens to all the European goals. And in general,

1:03:39

because the Soviet Union is far away. And

1:03:41

then Nazi Germany fascist Italy will

1:03:43

rule the group. So this is the really key

1:03:45

to the level that they face.

1:03:47

And so, you know, to what extent do you

1:03:49

think that the answer to that question was determined.

1:03:52

You know, you have some sort of political art economy

1:03:54

arguments about how the UK was

1:03:56

worried about escalation and and, like,

1:03:58

sanctioning Germany is

1:04:00

much more painful economically than essentially

1:04:02

Italy. So do you think there are sort of contingencies

1:04:05

here? Or, you know, was the world really

1:04:07

not ready to pull the trigger in nineteen thirty five?

1:04:11

It's a good question. I feel that

1:04:13

the way the sanctions against Italy went,

1:04:15

you can see continuously that it's a struggle

1:04:17

for between the imperialist at the people

1:04:19

who say Biofrontera's really given what he wants,

1:04:21

which is the infamous oral

1:04:24

evolved plan, which is essentially

1:04:26

a kind of peace deal they proposed two months

1:04:28

into the Ethiopian war to give at at

1:04:30

least some territory and keep a rub

1:04:32

Ethiopian state in place. And,

1:04:35

you know, again, very similar to arguments you

1:04:37

hear about the Russian Ukrainian words a day,

1:04:39

that there should be some sort of territorial

1:04:42

settlement about this so that you

1:04:44

could stabilize the broiler picture. But

1:04:47

it's clear that Britain and France don't wanna go

1:04:49

so far with sanctions as they actually push

1:04:51

was leaning into war against them, which they

1:04:54

are worried about. It's not that they couldn't ultimately win

1:04:56

it, but it would just derail everything. And mainly,

1:04:58

if they would have to put all their research into that

1:05:00

war, that would really give an opening for Germany

1:05:02

to do all sorts of destabilizing and

1:05:05

aggressive stuff

1:05:05

elsewhere. Yeah. It's the same reason

1:05:08

that France didn't fight in the Rhineland. Right?

1:05:10

It's because they just weren't ready. It wasn't in

1:05:12

the cards for them at that moment

1:05:15

in time, which is why as exciting

1:05:17

as the Straisal hypothetical seems, to

1:05:19

me, the leadership within France and

1:05:21

the UK not wanting to roll the

1:05:23

dice in a really serious way and

1:05:26

raise the stakes and call Nazi Germany's bluff.

1:05:28

Applies both to the sort of

1:05:31

territorial grandisement back when,

1:05:33

you know, the relative balance of power was more

1:05:35

in the favor of the allies. As well

1:05:37

as these sorts of economic moves, which

1:05:39

were were just sort of too scary for them to

1:05:42

to contemplate what the what the eventualities

1:05:44

might

1:05:44

open. Yeah. If if I could just add one more dimension

1:05:46

to this issue, it's also between elites

1:05:49

in the population and public opinion because

1:05:51

in this moment, there's a huge PR

1:05:53

campaign by civil society

1:05:55

organizations. In Britain, it's the league of nations

1:05:57

union, but it has chapters and equivalents

1:06:00

in most other countries. A huge effort

1:06:02

to drum up support for the league. And

1:06:04

there's also an important referendum,

1:06:06

so called peace ballot that shows that there are

1:06:08

big majorities for using economic

1:06:11

and even military sanctions among most

1:06:13

democratic populations against

1:06:16

Germany or against any breaker

1:06:19

of the peace. So Actually, it's

1:06:21

not the case of the democracies as,

1:06:23

you know, from the the population of most democracies

1:06:25

was very ready to go to war.

1:06:28

The popular France under under Bloomin'

1:06:30

France also has a similarly combative

1:06:32

attitude. And this is also

1:06:35

because, you know, the common term, the left wing party

1:06:37

supported. So there's also a kind of left wing, even

1:06:39

communist flavor to let's go to

1:06:41

war against Germany. And this actually

1:06:43

then feeds into why the

1:06:45

elites in prison and France becomes scared

1:06:48

of going that way? Because they do think that

1:06:50

confrontation is then something that

1:06:52

will tie them into a war with Germany, giving

1:06:55

again communism a free

1:06:57

hand in Asia where it's clearly present

1:06:59

in China, but also giving the Soviet Union

1:07:02

a freehand in Eastern Europe. So

1:07:04

the way that the the the dice

1:07:06

can fall here are extremely complicated, but

1:07:08

they also have to do elite mass dynamics

1:07:10

where I think it's the elites in Britain

1:07:12

and France that are much more pro appeasements and

1:07:15

scared of doing this than the masses

1:07:17

which show themselves super pro internationalist

1:07:20

pro sanctions, but actually

1:07:22

with a lot of buy in from the Soviet Union at left

1:07:24

wing parties, which then makes that

1:07:25

suspect. Fascinating.

1:07:27

Do you have a reading recommendations on this?

1:07:30

Actually, one of the books that

1:07:32

is quite good is the Spectre

1:07:34

of War by Jonathan Hasland, which is

1:07:37

about the interwar period through the

1:07:39

lens of fear of communism, but

1:07:41

also the power of these popular

1:07:44

fronts. Dynamics. So I think that

1:07:46

does a pretty good job of this. So

1:07:49

Italy conveys Ethiopia. Ethiopia

1:07:51

sort of darling in international community ends up

1:07:54

getting support, but there were

1:07:56

more aggressive things that

1:07:58

the world could have done. First positive

1:08:00

sanctions, to help Ethiopia, like, didn't

1:08:02

really end up happening. And, you know, you

1:08:04

have this option to ban

1:08:07

oil exports or close the suez canal,

1:08:09

which you know, in the historical record,

1:08:12

Muscellini was, like, freaking out about,

1:08:14

but didn't end up happening. So

1:08:17

so what was this sort of dynamic between,

1:08:19

like, annual versus

1:08:21

treasury, theory of sanctions

1:08:24

and position, and how did they play out in this context?

1:08:26

Yeah.

1:08:27

The the result of that tension that we

1:08:29

were just talking about between the imperial

1:08:31

paesars in London

1:08:33

and Paris and the internationalists

1:08:37

sanctionist camp is

1:08:39

that they find a new form of economic pressure

1:08:41

that they think is less severe,

1:08:43

less likely to escalate because it's more slow

1:08:46

acting, and it works on not

1:08:48

crucial inputs that might paralyze and

1:08:50

shut down an economy, but it works on

1:08:52

the other thing that the Fashion's regimes have very little

1:08:54

of, which is foreign exchange reserves. So

1:08:58

they start to develop this particularly in the

1:09:00

British treasury, which is why I call it the treasury

1:09:03

theory. But the idea is that it's

1:09:06

more useful to target the ability

1:09:09

of fascist countries to export their

1:09:11

goods, ban them from

1:09:13

exporting into the rest of the

1:09:15

world market. That way, you drive down

1:09:17

their export revenue And, ultimately, the

1:09:19

foreign exchange constraint is going to

1:09:22

force this very painful trade off between by,

1:09:25

you know, using your foreign exchange force. So imports

1:09:27

for for military inputs.

1:09:30

So that will then force them to

1:09:32

restrain themselves and and choose

1:09:34

for peace. And this

1:09:37

is why they they think that, you know,

1:09:39

ultimately, fascist Italy

1:09:41

is by them of more in the couture because Ethiopia's

1:09:44

huge. Most military experts think that this war

1:09:46

will take at least one and a half years because

1:09:48

you need at least two dry seasons

1:09:50

in order to conquer a country the size of Ethiopia.

1:09:53

And that they have a particular formula

1:09:57

almost for the the burn rate of

1:09:59

Italian foreign exchange reserves given

1:10:01

the size of the military force. The more troops

1:10:04

go into Africa, the bigger

1:10:06

the import needs are, the bigger the foreign exchange

1:10:09

spending becomes, and so the

1:10:11

quicker the higher the burn rates. So they

1:10:13

have an estimate that between nine to fifteen

1:10:15

months, Italy's gonna run out foreign exchange reserves

1:10:18

with sanctions on the time, exports in place

1:10:20

And we're not gonna have to do anything super provocative

1:10:22

like Tesla's Suez Canal kind of oil. We're

1:10:24

just giving them more rope to hang themselves

1:10:26

with. And one of British treasury officials has this

1:10:28

great phrase also, he says, we're

1:10:31

not gonna try and cripple the aggressor, but we wanna

1:10:33

make him pay through his

1:10:34

nose. And that's

1:10:36

kind of what they're what they aim these sanctions

1:10:39

at.

1:10:39

Which ended up not being the

1:10:41

right calculus. No. Because the

1:10:43

missing thing was again also that they didn't

1:10:45

put any positive means to stiffen

1:10:48

Ethiopian resistance in place. And

1:10:50

the war actually, the first few months doesn't go

1:10:52

as well as the Italians had hoped. In terms

1:10:55

of Ethiopian, it's really big. But it

1:10:57

uses a lot of the support that it could have

1:10:59

internationally. And it is

1:11:01

also actually, Britain does its credibly

1:11:04

dumb thing of placing both belligerents under

1:11:06

an armed embargo. So Ethiopia if

1:11:08

Lykon get weapons from Britain, but neither can Ethiopia.

1:11:11

So the the kind of logic of supporting

1:11:13

the victim, while punishment, the aggressor, only half

1:11:15

of it is implemented, and that punishment isn't

1:11:17

that severe. that's I think also one of the reasons

1:11:19

why Italy wins and gets away with

1:11:21

its

1:11:22

aggression. I feel like

1:11:24

this is a nice place to stop.

1:11:26

Thanks for making it. Through part one

1:11:28

of sanctions nineteenth century

1:11:30

to nineteen thirty five. In

1:11:33

part two, we are going to

1:11:35

explore the reaction

1:11:38

function that happens both,

1:11:41

you know, in the wider world as well as particularly

1:11:43

in Germany and Japan, to seeing

1:11:46

what ended up happening to Italy during

1:11:48

the Italy Ethiopian war. This is trying

1:11:50

to talk. We're still gonna get to ChinaTalk, but I think

1:11:52

the buildup for these sorts of conversations,

1:11:55

I think, is really important because this sort of

1:11:57

second half of the nineteen thirties, I feel like has

1:11:59

the most contemporary relevance to the US

1:12:01

China dynamic today with export controls and

1:12:03

whatnot. But this one was for me. I

1:12:07

just because I thought this one was so great. Thank

1:12:10

you.

1:12:52

If you'd like to be a jitter bump, first

1:12:54

thing you must do is get a gel,

1:12:57

put whiskey wine and gin within and shake

1:12:59

it all up, and then begin grab

1:13:01

a cup and start daws. You

1:13:03

aren't freaking jitter songs. Don't

1:13:05

you worry, you just mugging, then you'll

1:13:07

be a jitter boat. Here

1:13:09

this bad boy blowing his horn, he's been

1:13:12

on bugs since the day was born.

1:13:14

Your temperature, the sausage, rice, and

1:13:16

swerve, bring it to the day you die. Cheers,

1:13:19

and then ring your bell. Put you would

1:13:21

jitai madel. Don't you worry.

1:13:23

You just love you all with me a jitter

1:13:25

phone. These all boys

1:13:27

make sensible or chinder sauce

1:13:30

by phone. Say that forgive me all of 494I

1:13:33

think these folks can drink some more.

1:13:35

They drink some more tonight, never

1:13:37

stop my television. Diet. Don't

1:13:39

you worry. They just love their apartment

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and get their bones. Now, here's

1:13:43

old puppy. How we get old man. Big

1:13:45

small sauce and the other bugs can. He's

1:13:48

strict to the sauce every morning. Let's watch

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you the sauce with bone. Team shake

1:13:52

with this drum bone. Just hand me

1:13:54

that sauce and bone. Hello, father.

1:13:56

You just you'd always be a genophobe

1:14:00

and rip there with his eyes at Twinkle. We named

1:14:02

him after Rip Van Winkle. My

1:14:04

Rip meets me for twenty years. If you

1:14:06

could get his fill up beer, rip rings

1:14:08

his sauce, get on the stand, so forget

1:14:11

that he's in the bay. Don't always get

1:14:13

him. Just let him know. You'll always be a kid

1:14:15

about it.