The Great War's Economic Front

NICHOLAS A. LAMBERT. Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and First World War. HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 66z PAGES. $45.00. WEALTH MAY provide sinews of war, but policymakers have also asked whether economic power itself can be harnessed as an offensive weapon. Since victory means imposing one's will upon an adversary and not merely winning battles, economic power should provide valuable leverage. Indeed, it might even preclude need to fight. Blockades long played an important part in war, and sanctions became a common diplomatic tool in zoth century. Unfortunately, such measures provide a blunt instrument. Or, to vary metaphor, economic pressure can be a double-edged sword as ready to cut power wielding it as opponent at which it is aimed. Can it force an opponent to concede? Does it risk collateral damage, either by injuring country attempting economic war or by provoking others to intervene? Recent economic sanctions have proven hard to enforce. Governments imposing them face burden of keeping them in place over time against growing resistance, and countries neighboring target states often demand exemptions to spare their economies fallout or facilitate evasion. Wartime blockades involved higher stakes and consequently brought greater risk. Although Britain claimed a legal right to interdict trade from mid-18th century, its efforts during American War of Independence brought Dutch Republic into conflict and prompted other maritime states to form a Russianled league of armed neutrality. The same pattern during Britain's wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France expanded conflict by forcing neutral states to take sides. Napoleon invaded Spain, Portugal, and Russia partly to enforce his own system of trade war against Britain, while British attacked Denmark to keep it from siding with France. The United States responded to being caught in middle by first imposing an embargo on exports, which mainly hurt its own citizens, and then fighting War of 181z against Britain. Economic warfare during Napoleonic era gave later strategists a case study even as technology changed application of sea power. Woodrow Wilson went further in remarking during America's neutrality early in World War I that the circumstances of war of i8Tz and now run parallel. Yet they diverged enough to prevent another war between United States and Britain. The story of how tensions during World War I took a different course from Napoleonic era illuminates economic warfare's limitations with broader lessons for what it can and cannot accomplish. In Planning Armageddon, Nicholas Lambert meticulously reconstructs process by which Britain developed and then implemented plans for economic warfare against Germany. His well-written, though detailed, account provides a revisionist interpretation of British strategy which calls into question received opinion on how Royal Navy aimed to fight a European war. Studies of war plans before 1914 highlight discussions about bringing war to Germany by inshore operations and amphibious landings along coast that fit Royal Navy's traditional strategy and cultural emphasis on offensive. When geographical constraints and weapons technology precluded such measures, Britain engaged Germany's army alongside its French ally in what became a terrible war of attrition. The navy accordingly took a supportive role convoying men and material to France while denying Germany access to sea. Documents give credence to this conventional account, which makes sense against course of World War I, but Lambert uncovers another set of ideas from deliberations among naval planners that formed corner-stone of British grand strategy by I-914. International law and technologies including mine and torpedo made impractical kind of blockade Royal Navy had traditionally employed to interdict enemy trade completely, but an alternative strategy leveraged Britain's control over infrastructure of global trade to coerce Germany. …