1. Very quick thread on my review essay on new @njtmulder book, The Economic Weapon. This book is going to become a classic, and deservedly so. I wrote main draft 2 weeks ago, and only lightly updated it for current events, because it is so on the nose lawfareblog.com/modern-history…
2. I'm not a historian - so there are elements of the historical contribution that are inevitably going to elude me (the bits that I do know are where it hits international relations, via its countering of Carr's realist account of the League of Nations etc).
3. What I try to focus on is the key argument of the book, as I read it with my own biases, regarding sanctions. Mulder sees sanctions as both powerful and devastating, though nowhere near as predictable as their proponents imagine. They are a liberal weapon ...
4. Indeed, they are the dark shadow cast by the liberal dream of a truly interdependent global economy. They leverage the extraordinary benefits of interdependence, threatening to take them away. Equally, they can have unpredictable consequences applied against illiberal targets.
5. And like many liberal forms of intervention, they are less about avoiding the suffering, than smoothing it away, moving the deaths from the world of the visible and bloody bayonet, to the world of the bureaucrat, abstractly totting up the statistical data on his desk.
6. Crucially though, the more powerful they are, the greater the risk that they will have unanticipated consequences, both in driving illiberal states to the wall, perhaps provoking further aggression, and (though Mulder doesn't dwell on this as much) ...
7. disrupting the underlying systems that the world economy relies on. Mulder's account is mostly a skeptical one. However, there is another dimension that is worth focusing on - in other work, Mulder has suggested that sanctions could be deployed to different ends.
8. Specifically here - thenation.com/article/archiv… (the title is somewhat misleading), where he talks briefly about what a left sanctions policy might look like. It would focus on "international oligarchy as the connecting link between domestic economics and foreign policy."
9. My read of this (perhaps not Mulder's) is that rather than looking to make sanctions a tool disciplining unpredictable states, sanctions would be used to reshape the underlying systems of banking and finance that the current version of globalization relies on.
10. It would make them less amenable to oligarchy, kleptocracy and systematic corruption. Here, there is potential crossover with this new interview with @mattduss which talks about what a genuinely progressive foreign policy would look like. jewishcurrents.org/a-progressive-…
11. In Matt's words: “to confront the challenge … which is much bigger than just Putin, we need to understand the broader connections between corruption, oligarchy, and inequality, and change that approach. That’s part of the progressive theory of the case in foreign policy.”
12. So could sanctions be deployed differently, to press a progressive agenda? We've barely started to think coherently about this (or more honestly: I've barely started). I've no doubt that it would bring its own confusion, tradeoffs and costs in human misery.
13. Perhaps they may be countered or ameliorated. Perhaps not. But that is one of the important questions going forward - and one of the great virtues of Mulder's book is that it brings these costs to the center, rather than brushing them away. You should read it. Finis.
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