Nicholas Mulder
@njtmulder
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Political & economic history @Cornell . Author of “The Economic Weapon”. Europe, sanctions, geo-economics, Weltinnenpolitik. Writing a history of expropriation.
New York, USA
Joined October 2015
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"The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War" is out in the US today! It's a history of how we came to see economic pressure as such an appealing way of dealing with conflict, and how the invention of sanctions has changed the world:
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Based on the state of sanctions and counter-sanctions last week I expected shocks to specific markets, but it now seems very possible and even quite likely that we are headed for the first sanctions-induced global recession in world history. Astonishing.
“The barrage of Western sanctions against Russia has moved political and economic systems around the world into uncharted territory,” writes
@njtmulder
in a guest commentary for The Economist
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How in no time the West has gone from targeted sanctions to financial war against the post-Soviet economic space, without unified aims nor clear conditions for lifting restrictions, all while an impetuous nuclear-armed tyrant is waging a war of aggression, is quite terrifying.
I can't overstate how unprecedented this is. The ruble was at 25 to the dollar pre-2014 and 60 after the oil crash that year.
Most Russians don't have savings. 20m are in poverty. Migrants send remittances to Central Asia. It's ordinary people who will really suffer.
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For those interested in sanctions, interwar history, and political economy: my book "The Economic Weapon" is coming out with Yale University Press in early 2022. 11 January in the US and 22 February in the UK.
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Is there anything to read on Europa Universalis IV? I hadn't heard of it until recently, but a sizeable number of students end up in my modern Europe survey course because of this game, and I'm keen to understand its worldview.
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“The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War” is out in paperback today! Lighter and cheaper than the original, thanks to the great team at
@yalepress
:
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Strongly recommend Jairus Banaji's "A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism", which makes the case for regarding merchant capital as the global linchpin connecting spheres of circulation & production. Braudelian scope with Marxian heft, all in under 130 pages. A terrific book.
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"Sanctions are no longer scalpel-like instruments that exploit globalisation. At their current scale, they're a tempest that will change globalisation itself in major ways."
A short essay for
@TheEconomist
placing sanctions on Russia in historical context
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Absolutely devastating Zeit article on Dutch obstinacy: "Solidarity is not just a question of money and means. It begins by giving the wounded the feeling one sympathizes with them. This skill the government led by Mark Rutte apparently does not possess."
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Historians of political thought: Brexit is about re-aligning sovereignty and government
Economic historians: that's fine but you've just effected the financial transition of 1688 in reverse
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Out of two dozen or so attempts during the last century to stop wars using sanctions, only three real successes exist: League of Nations sanctions threats against Yugoslavia (1921) and Greece (1925), and the US pressure that forced Britain to call off its Suez expedition (1956).
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An indication of how crazy Japan's 1980s real estate boom was: countries like Australia, Argentina, Malaysia, and Peru sold off their Tokyo embassies because property values were high enough ($425 million for a single building) to meaningfully reduce budget deficits back home.
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For
@ForeignAffairs
I wrote a preliminary assessment of economic sanctions on Russia so far. Many initial expectations were proven wrong. To paraphrase Moltke, no sanctions strategy extends with certainty beyond the first economic shock that it triggers.
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The oil glut is bad, but have you heard of the Yugoslav plum glut of 1939? Caused by Nazi military mobilization, its destabilizing effects included mass binge drinking, a murder spree, mutiny and many hangovers (which provided opportunities for German aspirine export).
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Imagine a consistent application of the principle that third countries can lawfully expropriate aggressor state assets–e.g. a parallel world where invasion of Iraq that began 20 yrs ago today led China and India to seize US property to compensate Iraqis.
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Just finished "Collapse," Vladislav Zubok's new account of the fall of the USSR. The most gripping history I've read this year, avoiding Cold War nostrums to map dissolution as a multi-dimensional struggle over economic reform, devolution & terms of union.
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The geo-economic discourse that's taken hold in Western capitals in recent months now encounters basic facts of political economy: the US can embrace friend-shoring & ditch trade openness far more easily than the EU, which lacks the domestic demand base needed for bloc formation.
In what sounds like a swipe against U.S. push for decoupling from China, Scholz said in Brussels that he wants to maintain close trade ties with Beijing
"The EU prides itself on being a union interested in global trade and it does not side with those who promote deglobalization"
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Have been reading
@e_pravilova
's forthcoming history of the ruble. A fascinating study of how the backing and convertibility of money can found entire political traditions around the poles of autocracy and constitutionalism, sovereignty and accountability. Out in June 2023!
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Excited that the proofs for The Economic Weapon are in!
For those interested in sanctions, interwar history, and political economy: my book "The Economic Weapon" is coming out with Yale University Press in early 2022. 11 January in the US and 22 February in the UK.
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While finishing my book I wasn't sure about an epigraph until I found this nugget from Hegel, which perfectly captures its argumentative and narrative spirit.
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The value of cultural capital if I ever saw it
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Totally trivial and probably of interest to three people, but maybe it should be better known that Joseph Conrad, Vasily Grossman, and Sholem Aleichem were all born in one small Ukrainian city, the same place where Balzac was married?
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Austria-Hungary in 1916 produced 18 times, tsarist Russia 80 times and imperial Germany 129 times as many artillery shells as the entire EU can produce in 2023 (650,000). Even after completing a planned 500% increase by 2028 the US will only be at 1/12th of peak Habsburg output.
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Good to see
@gabriel_zucman
and Emmanuel Saez make the case for wartime-inspired excess profits taxation of Amazon, Facebook, pharmaceutical firms and others reaping extraordinary gains from the pandemic: .
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What are the global economic effects of the sanctions against Russia? What choices does the West face? How can market turmoil and economic fallout be contained? I wrote about these acute dilemmas for
@ForeignAffairs
. A short thread: 1/14
The Toll of Economic War
How sanctions on Russia will upend the global order.
www.foreignaffairs.com
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Acemoglu et al's paper on Italian fascism is neither shocking nor novel; it just confirms what we've known for a century, when the fascists themselves announced it: they were fighting socialism. But their literature review misrepresents this as an open question when it isn't.
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The comparative story that stands out is Taiwan versus Brazil: both industry-intensive military dictatorships with similar shares of manufacturing VA in 1980, but whereas Taiwan *reindustrializes* in the new millenium, Brazil sees Anglo-American levels of deindustrialization.
Over the half century btw 1970 and 2020 the UK’s rate of deindustrialization was the most dramatic amongst advanced economies. From fascinating piece by
@andrewbatson
at
@Gavekal
on China’s new efforts to resist deindustrialization.
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How do we protect ambitious climate finance plans at a time of rising geopolitical tensions?
I wrote a piece for
@FT
on what we can learn from the internationalists of the 1940s. It sketches what a modern-day Green Lend-Lease program might look like.
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Very happy to see the first review of "The Economic Weapon" by Sir Lawrence Freedman (
@LawDavF
) in the January/February issue of
@ForeignAffairs
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Excited to see this detailed review by Paul Kennedy in the
@WSJ
: "Mulder devotes a large chunk of his valuable book to showing how diplomats, Treasury officials and international jurists wrestled with this important piece of the new Versailles System".
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Job alert:
@CornellHistory
is hiring a historian of the U.S. in the world (19th-21st centuries). The position starts in fall 2022 and applications are due by September 10. More information available at: .
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It’s a combination of factors including the disruption caused by the war itself, pre-existing shortages and supply chain issues, tighter funding and rate hikes. But hard not to see these unprecedented sanctions and reactions to them as the final straw that tips the scales.
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Much to admire in Stefan Link's sweeping yet meticulous Forging Global Fordism, but especially its 'political history of mass production', a story from the Midwest to Gorky showing how clash of producerism and consumerism, artisans and masses was present even in Nazi-Soviet war.
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What would people in 2017 consider the most important events of 1917? Georges Clemenceau's prediction, made exactly 100 years ago today:
1) The Russian Revolution 2) US entry into world politics 3) the emancipation of the Arabs from Ottoman rule.
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Getting ready to explain the EU in historical perspective in my intro to modern Europe class
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Legacy effects of previous sanctions interacting w/ recent ones: Trump’s campaign against Huawei caused spree buying of semiconductor components by Chinese firms, aggravating the chip shortage that is now plaguing European manufacturing industry being hit by surging energy costs.
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Never forget that this week it's 500 years ago since this palatial room in St Ludwig witnessed Charles V being crowned Holy Roman Emperor of the Germans.
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A book excerpt in
@ForeignPolicy
on a great historical reversal: in the early 20th century the US was the great abstainer from economic sanctions embraced by European states; but today America is their most avid user, while Europeans have lost enthusiasm.
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if we’re going to keep using the term “emerging markets” we should at least have an corresponding “degenerating markets” category
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"In short, in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s war, Europe is once again confronted with the necessity for peacemaking."
Mark Mazower with one of the most measured and clear-sighted historical commentaries on the current moment I've read so far.
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For those interested in logistics: this fascinating paper by A.J. Heywood argues the Ottoman closing of Turkish Straits was most underrated event of WWI, devastating Russia's economy, causing a railway crisis that cut food supply & led to 1917 revolution:
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Just finished this: a powerful synthesis of war origins, aims & outcomes debates with a strong case for Central Powers' responsibility for the outbreak v. Allies' responsibility for the long duration of the war. Timely with regard to Ukraine now. Thanks for the rec
@JonathanBoff
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Serious respect for Georgi Derluguian for producing this map of class fractures in the post-Soviet transition.
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Starting to see the possibility of a very grim two-layered siege situation emerging: a Russian military-territorial siege of Kiev enveloped by a Western economic-financial siege of Russia.
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Russia has made it through the first year of sanctions in better shape than many expected. But the Ukrainian economy is in crisis. As a war of attrition looms, sanctions matter less than supporting its much weaker economy.
My piece for
@nytopinion
:
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Wrote about the uses and limits of the war economy in fighting the coronavirus for
@ForeignPolicy
. We're in a state of exception, but beyond expanding production, demanding sacrifice, and doing reform, we need new forms of solidarity and resourcefulness.
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The West's sanctions calibration dilemma re: Russia today resembles League v. Italy 1935: crippling sanctions will be so provocative that they can escalate into a much wider war, whereas gradualism leaves surer road to diplomatic settlement–but also permits further aggression.
For those disappointed by the West's sanctions on Russia today .. remember the goal here is to prevent a wider more deadly war.
Deeper sanctions on Russia today would leave little in the West's armoury to counter further escalation
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Had a little anthropocenic Sebald moment on this beautiful weekend staring at some eight-decade-old Atlantikwall bunkers, slowly sliding off the dunes and into the ocean as the coastline crumbles and the tides advance.
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It was great to discuss sanctions on the
@ezraklein
Show (
@nytopinion
). Rogé Karma and I talk at length (1h20m) about the history of sanctions, how they (are supposed to) work, their uncertain effects and overall efficacy, their risks, and alternatives.
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Wow the atomic prank that Brezhnev pulled on Pompidou
Benoît Pelopidas and Sébastien Philippe had me gasping in astonishment at the anecdotes and footnotes. This vignette about a chain of mishaps that could have started the Third World War is especially fascinating. 2/2
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Sanctions accelerating self-sufficiency, as predicted
“US sanctions were intended to slow China’s progress in emerging fields…by cutting off its ability to buy or build advanced semiconductors... The unveiling of a domestically produced seven-nanometer chip suggests that has not happened.”
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Skip the Queen's Gambit and watch The Kingmaker, an absolutely riveting documentary by Laura Greenfield about Imelda Marcos and her dynasty that also ends up shining a very stark light on oligarchy and authoritarianism in the world today.
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After the Hohenzollerns, another expropriation dispute in post-Habsburgia: Liechtenstein is using the ECHR to claim its ruling family's Czech territories confiscated by the Beneš government in 1945, lands over 10 times the size of the principality itself.
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One senses a lot of frustration among Atlanticists about Germany's deep-rooted Handelsstaat inclinations, but unless industrial policy, mass investment & genuine redistributive policies are put in place, demanding Berlin commits to decoupling remains a call for economic suicide.
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Mazower's history of the Greek War of Independence comes out in November. Bound to be a good one.
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Great
@_TimBarker
essay that drives home why we can't have better politics without better economic history, lest myths occlude real vision:"Without an explanation of how this all went wrong, nostalgia for the postwar era offers nothing to today’s debates."
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The tax plans of Biden (left) and Sanders (right) are really very different. Only the latter actually lowers both working and middle-class taxes and proposes serious taxes on the super-wealthy. Thanks to
@gabriel_zucman
and Tax Justice Now for these:
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European history teaching tip: don't skip absolutism. Visually striking, vital to nationhood & democracy + good way to cover places like Denmark, Saxony, Sweden, Piedmont-Sardinia, Portugal. Also has v appealing adjectives: Frederician, Albertine, Gustavian, Pombaline, Savoyard.
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1. Some notes on influences on this essay, which has been in the works for several months. I profited from the work of
@adam_tooze
on the Eurocrisis and
@zeithistoriker
on neoliberalism, to which I try to add a political-historical angle.
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The real issue with the current path of US economic statecraft is less that there are few guardrails left––other countries will simply learn to prepare for anything––than that there is no coherent and universalizable vision of world order towards which policy is working.
Last week,
@adam_tooze
lamented in the FT that Biden's "economic security doctrine" was "spiked with brazen, 'America first' power-mongering."
He pointed out that this doctrine had "escalated the tension" with China.
Headlines like this are case in point.
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Imperial Germany lost circa 2/3 of its net foreign capital stock–assets equivalent to 25-28% of 1913 GDP–due to expropriation in World War I. Rough estimates from my article on the seizure of German assets during and after the Great War:
@BrankoMilan
Putin economics & his super Marshall plan.
I do not think that ever in history a county has transferred about 1/3 of its GDP (>$500b of frozen assets) to a set of counties with which it planned to go into an undeclared war.
US Marshall plan was ~2% of US GDP.
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It was a pleasure to talk with
@adam_tooze
and Mark Mazower about how to think about COVID in economic history, the uses and limits of war metaphors, the Anthropocene, global debt issues, and much else, during the
@columbiaideas
seminar last week:
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In an age of fragile globalization & geopolitical tension, Keynes's lessons about fiscal spending are back in vogue. But what's little known is that he also argued that provision helped world stability more than economic sanctions. My piece for
@guardian
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My new theory is that some of the best philosophy of history comes from medievalists with modernist interests. Hayden White is one; this from Geoffrey Barraclough’s great “Introduction to Contemporary History” (1966) is another example, v relevant to concerns about ‘presentism’.
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Sharp
@BrankoMilan
blog that intimates the emerging paradox of political and economic change in the 2020s: there is a policy framework available for adoption that goes beyond neoliberalism, but it isn't one premised on, or conducive to, peace.
1/"the West should abandon globalization. Instead...the West should revert to trade blocs, in this case created between the nations sharing certain political values & geopolitical interests"
Can US radically end 1899-2022 "Open Door" policy?
@BrankoMilan
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Periodic reminder that a per capita energy consumption compatible with preserving the biosphere, about 50-58 GJ p/a (the standard of living enjoyed by the inhabitants of Lyon or Kyoto in the 1960s) is possible for everyone alive today if we prioritized distribution & equality.
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Just heard of the passing of Mack Walker. A master of complex social history, deeply learned and original. German Home Towns (1971) is a riveting account of the Holy Roman Empire as a cradle of particularist resistance to the universalism of modernity. An inspiring scholar. RIP.
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An important sign that Kantianism has dangerous religious metaphysics is the fact that during the Boer War, Jan Smuts read the Critique of Pure Reason and the Old Testament in ancient Greek each night and would then run dynamite-packed trains into populated towns in the morning.
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Overexpectations about the impact of sanctions on Russia has been mirrored by excessive fears about Europe’s troubles. Both views underestimate resource fungibility in modern societies and the wider options for trade diversification in a more regionally balanced global economy.
Extraordinary, given all the effort in sanctioning Russia, the decline in GDP during 2022 was in the range of the decline the US suffered during the 2009 financial crisis & considerably less than many other countries have suffered during financial crises.
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Have been haunted recently by a line from Norman Stone’s masterful The Eastern Front, describing the doubling down on maximal war aims by all belligerents in 1916:
“The appeal to force was becoming irresistible, just when force was at its least decisive.”
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Negative oil prices are unprecedented. But historically we have seen such extreme oil 'counter-shocks' before: in 1986, 1997 & 2014. We're now in a fourth one.
@adam_tooze
and I sketch what this might mean for Asian, Latin American & African petro-states:
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@lionel_trolling
@AntonJaegermm
@re_colston
@SethAckerman
@EricLevitz
@dmk1793
How about 1) the right's 20th-c encounter w/ mass democracy led to various gambits to erect authoritarianism on a mass basis 2) fascism was most radical one 3) the broad right-authorit. tendency never left 4) current conditions ≠ fascist moment but 5) threat to democracy's real.
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Obtained some much-needed distance from events this week by reading
@Amin_Samman
's History in Financial Times, "a philosophy of history fit for the world of contemporary global finance". I've come across no better analysis of how the present feeds off our historical imagination.
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"What are our political options when there's every reason to think we have very little time left?...Lenin noted in the margins of Hegel’s The Science of Logic: ‘Breaks in gradualness ... Gradualness explains nothing without leaps. Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!’"
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Always love questions to which the answer is the Holy Roman Empire
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A tale of three confiscations:
November 1979: Carter freezes >$11 billion in Iranian funds held in US banks
February 2011: Obama freezes $29.7 billion in Libyan assets held in US institutions
February 2022: Biden and EU allies freeze $388 billion in Russian central bank reserves
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In 1935, a 52-country coalition imposed sanctions to stop a war of aggression after a months-long military buildup. What can we learn from the Italo-Ethiopian War about the war-ending potential of economic pressure? Some thoughts in
@NewStatesman
:
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Between these steps to nationalize much of the remaining foreign capital in Russia and the Western reserve freezes and expropriations of oligarchic assets, it's been quite the month for confiscation in the 21st century.
Putin signed a law today that will make it possible for Russia to nationalize the 500+ airplanes that Western leasing companies have demanded to be returned to them.
The planes are worth more than USD 10 billion.
This is how doing business with Russia often ends.
In theft.
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Reviewed several books on the legacy of 1989 for
@nplusonemag
. In light of the last thirty years, the question appears: is what began in the 1990s with the creation of "capitalism without capitalists" now moving towards globalization without globalists?
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European governments who think that a massive shock in the range of 12 to 20% of GDP can be absorbed with a few new loans from the European Stability Mechanism (whose total available capital is a paltry €410bn–just 3.4% of Eurozone GDP) are deluding themselves.
Deutsche Bank expect eurozone GDP to contract 11.4% in the second quarter of 2020. Broken down country-by-country (cumulative change in GDP between Q1 and Q2):
🇪🇸 -20.1%
🇮🇹 -16.3%
🇬🇧 -15.1%
🇫🇷 -14.8%
🇩🇪 -12.2%
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I wrote for the
@WSJ
Weekend Review on the open questions surrounding the West’s economic sanctions against Russia, (incl. how to use >$640bn in frozen assets), and what economic peace might look like if an end to the war becomes politically possible.
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"Whatever comes next will not be a simple return, if only because of the radical transformations to which capital and the environment will subject each other in the coming century...we are all transition theorists now."
@_TimBarker
on Jairus Banaji:
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Seventies-style American autarky: in the midst of the 1979 oil shock, Walt Rostow wrote a WSJ op-ed calling for "a massive program which will undertake for the synthetic production of oil and gas what public-private collaboration achieved for synthetic rubber in WWII."
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My attitude to the price controls debate is similar to proposals for planning, expropriation & industrial policy more generally: all such practices already have been & are being used, so blanket yes/no positions aren't as helpful as exploring history to tell good from bad cases.
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Looking forward to presenting some new work on central bank asset confiscation from my forthcoming book on the history of expropriation at Vanderbilt next week.
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“You can’t judge by end states, you need to judge the actual historical processes that produce whatever state people are in today…Amilcar Cabral was fighting the Portuguese Empire at the same time as Rawls was writing A Theory of Justice.”
@OlufemiOTaiwo
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An overview of the financial burden Sukarno incurred to obtain independence: taking over and paying off the fl. 4.5bn of Dutch East Indies debt. Hence after 1949 Indonesia paid more to the Netherlands than the latter received in Marshall aid from the US.
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Reading an economists' paper that describes the medieval Church as a 'monopolist producer of salvation'; the only problem with an antitrust view of the Reformation is that Calvinism immediately hurts consumer welfare by introducing new market rigidities such as 'the elect'.
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For those skeptical sanctions have anything to do with this price shock, notice the relative calm in prices in the first days following the invasion and then a real take-off as the larger sanctions package came in over the weekend of 26-27 Feb
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Amazing self-own of a review by Rajan, dismissing the concept of ideology, "a vague term that seems to imply a kind of public brainwashing" to then say the rich "have already shown an ability to put resources to good use — which is why they are wealthy."
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My article on the sanctions against Russia is now out at
@IMFNews
' Finance and Development. Some thoughts on comparable episodes in economic history & on international effects of the sanctions, plus suggestions on how the global macro shock can be offset:
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Sweeping piece on the global housing crisis, from Argentina to Australia, Ireland to Singapore: "Rent [is] the 21st century equivalent of the bread price". Responses range "from rent caps to special taxes on landlords [to] nationalizing private property."
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