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I came to Nicholas Mulder’s The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War with a practical question in mind: why do we keep reaching for sanctions when the evidence for their effectiveness is so thin? Mulder’s answer, built on meticulous historical research, turns out to be more interesting than the question itself.
The story begins after the First World War, when liberal internationalists — far from the “bleeding-heart pacifists” of popular caricature — tried to repurpose the techniques of wartime economic blockade into a peacetime deterrent. The idea was that the memory of civilian suffering during the war would be enough to keep future aggressors in check. For a while it worked: the threat alone settled disputes in the Balkans in the 1920s. Then the Great Depression changed the calculation. As Norwegian internationalist Christian Lange warned in 1933, sanctions could deter small states but not “powerfully-armed States.” Peacetime sanctions became indistinguishable from the wartime blockade that had inspired them.
What I find most striking in Mulder’s account is a historical irony he brings to light with great clarity. The United States — the country that between the wars most fervently opposed economic sanctions, dismissing them as an anachronistic form of European imperialism — became, from the 1940s onwards, their most enthusiastic practitioner. In 1929 President Hoover could still call sanctions fundamentally un-American. A little over a decade later, Roosevelt’s projection of global power went hand in hand with oil embargoes and Lend-Lease. The institutional foundation for modern American sanctions policy was laid during the Korean War, when the Treasury’s Foreign Funds Control was transformed into the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) — an agency whose reach today extends far beyond American borders.
The numbers are sobering. Since the end of the Cold War, the frequency of sanctions use has roughly quadrupled, while their rate of success has gone in the opposite direction: from 35–40 per cent in the late 1980s and early 1990s to below 20 per cent by 2016. Only about one in three twentieth-century sanctions episodes achieved even partial success. We use them more and more, and they work less and less.
Mulder draws a distinction here that I think is essential: between efficacy — whether sanctions achieve their stated goals — and effects — the broader impact they have on world history. The two do not always coincide. The most successful interwar sanctions, against Yugoslavia in 1921 and Greece in 1925, were threats that never needed to be applied: minimal effects, high efficacy. The League sanctions against Italy in the 1930s failed to stop Mussolini but had profound effects on Nazi Germany and Japan, accelerating their turn toward autarky. Understanding sanctions requires holding both dimensions in view.
At the root of the problem, Mulder argues, lies a flawed assumption: that states and peoples behave as rational economic actors, responsive above all to material incentives. They do not. Nationalism, cultural identity, historical grievance, the desire for self-determination — these are forces that economic pressure cannot easily bend. Mulder reaches back to Herodotus, to the ancient Persians who chose to “live in a harsh land and rule, rather than to sow a level plain, and be the slaves of others.” Sanctions project not only material force but also political and cultural values, and those values often provoke resistance rather than compliance.
Economic sanctions have become a permanent feature of international politics — the instinctive response when military action is unpalatable and doing nothing is politically impossible. Their capacity to change the world, however, remains limited. As Mulder puts it, “stitching animosity into the fabric of international affairs and human exchange is of limited use in changing the world.” The economic weapon may be politics by other means, but its philosophical foundations — the assumption that rational economic calculation will prevail — are precisely what constrain its effectiveness in a world where collective choices are driven by far broader considerations.