Phil Duffy on how embargoes have turned out in history

Wikipedia initially blames the Continental System on Napoleon’s Berlin Edict of November 1806 for barring trade with the British Empire. Only later in the first paragraph do we learn that the Berlin Decree was in response to,

… the naval blockade of the French coasts enacted by the British government on 16 May 1806.

Napoleon and his troops ate fairly well, as did the leaders and troops of the British. Both got the external enemy they needed to acquire more power. The British and French people did not fare so well.

The runup to World War I included interference of free trade according to Historic UK:

Britain declared war on Germany on August 4th 1914, but rivalry between the two countries had been growing for years. Germany resented Britain’s control of the world’s oceans and markets, while Britain increasingly viewed a Europe dominated by a powerful and aggressive Germany as a threat which must be contained.

The Mises Institute has a good summary of the situation that led to World War I:

After creating a powerful and industrializing German federation which threatened Europe's "balance of power," Bismarck worked to prevent war. He reconciled Austria, maintained friendly relations with Russia, and got along as well as possible with France. He worked against Germany's "encirclement" by France and an ally-to prevent a two-front war. After Bismarck's dismissal in 1890 by the impulsive young Kaiser Wilhelm II (a crowned TR), German policy drifted into the encirclement Bismarck feared.

Much of the analysis of the runup to World War I focuses blame on Wilhelm II’s clumsy efforts at diplomacy. It seems the theme of Barbara Tuchman’s first chapter in The Guns of August, The Funeral [of Edward VII of Britain]. But a timeline sheds a different light on the matter, with the Entente Cordiale of April 1904 being the leading event. The Gov.UK site states this about the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907:

On 31 August 1907, Britain and Russia signed an agreement in St Petersburg which put in place the final piece of the alliance system which has widely been considered to have been a major contributing factor regarding the outbreak of the First World War.

There was some real concern in Germany about “encirclement.” It is too easy to become distracted by “Who started World War I?,” and lose sight of the lesson that comes out of that period. Europe had flourished with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which led to Europe’s most peaceful time until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 (Crimean War the exception on the continent). That corresponded with a move away from mercantilism/militarism toward classical liberalism and free trade. Peace and economic flourishing were shattered when mercantilism made its comeback, and the fault may be laid on the leadership of all of the nations involved in that war. The people surely were not seeking war. It was the political elites that wished it and expected to benefit from it. The armistice and Treaty of Versailles did nothing to resolve the underlying problem of economic warfare. After the devastation of Germany and surrounding countries, European leaders finally came to their senses with the Treaty of Rome in March of 1957 which led to the creation of the European Economic Community.

~ Phil Duffy, November 21, 2023

Meirion & Susie Harries on how entry into World War I transformed America

At Cantigny and Belleau Wood, on the Marne, and across the Soissons plateau to the Vesle river, American divisions helped push the Germans back.  Their performance helped brace the Allies; but it was the promise of apparently limitless power to come that buried German hopes.  In the fall, two newly minted American armies joined the massive offensive that finally brought Germany to her knees.

So why, given such solid achievement, is America's Great War so little regarded at home?  Obviously, this conflict has been overlaid by the wars that followed, the Second World Ear in particular.  But emotion has helped make America's memory selective too - and the strongest emotion in the mix has been shame: the nineteen months of war began in a blaze of patriotic unity, and ended in bitterness, division, and regret.

American went to fight in 1917 with an innocent determination to remake the world; the nation emerged in November 1918 with its sense of purpose shattered, with its certainties shaken, and with a new and unwelcome self-knowledge.  Many Americans wanted to turn their backs on the war almost from the moment it ended.

The timing of the war could not have been worse for American society.  In 1914, the country was changing more rapidly than at any time in its history.  People were trying to come to terms with the massive industrial development that had followed the Civil War - the vast immigration it had sparked, the growth of the cities, the closing of the frontier, the new technologies and their impact on daily life and work.  War interrupted all the attempts at social reform and the search for a new, united America, and it aggravated the tensions of a society in flux.

The nature of the war increased the damage.  This was total war, the conflict not of army against army but nation against nation, and it required the mobilization of every resource, human, moral, and material; the shock was greater because few Americans had seriously contemplated the possibility of entering the war and the country had made no preparations to fight a land war in Europe.  Unplanned and uncoordinated, the mobilization exploded under a society that prided itself on being quintessentially civilian.

The federal budget grew from $742 million in 1916 to almost $14 billion in 1918, and the balance of political power shifted just as dramatically.  Where once power had been widely dispersed and shared, during the war the nation was organized and directed from the center down to the details of its dress, its food, and its conversation.  The nation surrendered itself to the draft, to censorship, to repression.  Dissent was forbidden, and even honest criticism was outlawed.  Worse, ordinary Americans volunteered to police the system, to spy on their neighbors, to condone violence and the abuse of civil rights, to participate in a shameful travesty of their former lives.

By insisting on conformity, the government placed enormous strains on this diverse society.  The emotions it whipped up to unite its people against the foreign enemy - hatred, fear, suspicion, intolerance - turned inward and ravaged the people themselves.  Blacks, radicals, religious minorities, the foreign-born, all became scapegoats for the country's ills, victims of a nativism that grew more intense as the first shoots of communism appeared on American soil in 1918.

[...]

When the peace negotiations at Versailles finally came to an end, America perceived itself as having gained nothing; the prevailing sense was of having participated in a vindictive, dishonorable treaty dictated by the Allies.  As far as they were able, Americans turned their backs on Europe and tried to return to normality.  But there was no going back for America, any more than for Britain or Russia.  Americans could not recapture the innocent optimism and self-confidence of the prewar days.  Wide rents had appeared in the social fabric of American, and the experiment of the melting pot appeared to be over.  Rudely, the war had thrust Americans into the uncertain future of the twentieth century: its consequences are our legacy today.

~ Meirion & Susie Harries, The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917-1918 (1997), prologue, pp. 7-9

Tom Woods on the World War I blockade against Germany

Think back to World War I, when the Allies continued their starvation blockade of Germany for four months after that country surrendered.  Estimates of the consequences of that policy range from 750,000 to 1 million German civilians dead from hunger.

Within a generation, as you will recall, a rather distasteful political party emerged there, whose members, generally young, remembered having nearly been starved to death as children.  Resentment over past injustices has been a powerful and destructive force in recent history.

~ Thomas E. Woods, Jr., "Lift U.S. Sanctions: They Choke The Tyrannized More Than The Tyrants," Investor's Business Daily, March 19, 2001

Woodrow Wilson on neutrality

Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt.

~ Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)
1938

Walter Lippmann on war propaganda

We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace. Is it necessary for us the height of our power to stoop to such self-deceiving nonsense?

~ Walter Lippmann, former advisor to Woodrow Wilson

World War I Victory
1919

C.A. Philips, T.F. McManus, and R.W. Nelson on the seeds of World War I inflation

Had it not been for the creation of the Federal Reserve System, there would have been a [lower] limit to the expansion of bank credit during the War. . . . The establishment of the Federal Reserve System, with its pooling and economizing of reserves, thus permitt[ed] a greater credit expansion on a given reserve base. . . . It is in the operations of the Federal Reserve System, then, that the major explanation of the War-time rise in prices lies.

~ C.A. Philips, T.F. McManus, and R.W. Nelson, Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States (1937):

Robert Higgs on government meddling in the economy during WWI

By the time of the armistice, the government had taken over the ocean-shipping, railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries; commandeered hundreds of manufacturing plants; entered into massive enterprises on its own account in such varied departments as shipbuilding, wheat trading, and building construction; undertaken to lend huge sums to business directly or indirectly and to regulate the private issuance of securities; established official priorities for the use of transportation facilities, food, fuel, and many raw materials; fixed the prices of dozens of important commodities; intervened in hundreds of labor disputes; and conscripted millions of men for service in the armed forces.

~ Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan

George Bernard Shaw on WWI

I see the people of England united in a fierce detestation of the views and acts of Prussian Junkerism. And I see the German people stirred to the depths by a similar antipathy to English Junkerism, and anger at the apparent treachery and duplicity of the attack made on them by us in their extremist peril from France and Russia. I see both nations duped, but alas! not quite unwillingly duped, by their Junkers and Militarists into wreaking on one another the wrath they should have spent in destroying Junkerism and Militarism in their own country.

~ George Bernard Shaw, "Common Sense About the War," 1914