On April 12, 1861, rebel artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter, beginning the US
Civil War. The war eventually became a catastrophe for the South, which lost
more than a fifth of its young men. But why did the secessionists believe they
could pull it off?
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One reason was
they believed themselves to be in possession of a powerful economic weapon. The
economy of Britain, the world’s leading power at the time, was deeply dependent
on Southern cotton, and they thought a cutoff of that supply would force
Britain to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. Indeed, the Civil War
initially created a “cotton famine” that threw thousands of Britons out of
work.
In the end, of
course, Britain stayed neutral — in part because British workers saw the Civil
War as a moral crusade against slavery and rallied to the Union cause despite
their suffering.
Why recount this
old history? Because it has obvious relevance to the Russian invasion of
Ukraine. It seems fairly clear that Vladimir Putin saw the reliance of Europe,
and Germany in particular, on Russian natural gas the same way slave owners saw
Britain’s reliance on King Cotton: a form of economic dependence that would
coerce these nations into enabling his military ambitions.
And he was not
entirely wrong. Last week I castigated Germany for its unwillingness to make
economic sacrifices for the sake of Ukraine’s freedom. But let us not forget
that Germany’s response to Ukraine’s pleas for military aid on the eve of war
was also pathetic. Britain and the US rushed to provide lethal weapons,
including hundreds of the anti-tank missiles that were so crucial in repelling
Russia’s attack on Kyiv. Germany offered and dragged its feet on delivering …
5,000 helmets.
And it is not
hard to imagine that if, say, Donald Trump were still president here, Putin’s
bet that international trade would be a force for coercion, not peace, would
have been vindicated.
If you think I
am trying to help shame Germany into becoming a better defender of democracy,
you are right. But I am also trying to make a broader point about the
relationship between globalization and war, which is not as simple as many
people have assumed.
There has been a
long-standing belief among Western elites that commerce is good for peace, and
vice versa. America’s long push for trade liberalization, which began even
before World War II, was always in part a political project: Cordell Hull,
Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state, firmly believed that lower tariffs and
increased international trade would help lay the foundations for peace.
… law-abiding nations need to show that they will not be deterred from defending freedom. Autocrats may believe that financial exposure to their authoritarian regimes will make democracies afraid to stand up for their values. We need to prove them wrong.
The EU, too, was
both an economic and a political project. Its origins lie in the European Coal
and Steel Community, established in 1952 with the explicit goal of making
French and German industry so interdependent that there could never be another
European war.
And the roots of
Germany’s current vulnerability go back to the 1960s, when the West German
government began pursuing Ostpolitik — “eastern policy” — seeking to normalize
relations, including economic relations, with the Soviet Union, in the hope
that growing integration with the West would strengthen civil society and move
the East toward democracy. Russian gas began flowing to Germany in 1973.
So does trade
promote peace and freedom? Surely it does in some cases. In other cases,
however, authoritarian rulers more concerned with power than with prosperity
may see economic integration with other nations as a license for bad behavior,
assuming that democracies with a strong financial stake in their regimes will
turn a blind eye to their abuses of power.
I am not talking
just about Russia. The EU has stood by for years while Viktor Orban of Hungary
has systematically dismantled liberal democracy. How much of this weakness can
be explained by the large Hungarian investments that European, and especially German,
companies have made while pursuing cost-cutting outsourcing?
And then there
is the really big question: China. Does Xi Jinping see China’s close
integration with the world economy as a reason to avoid adventurous policies —
such as invading Taiwan — or as a reason to expect a weak-kneed Western
response? Nobody knows.
Now, I am not
suggesting a return to protectionism. I am suggesting that national-security
concerns about trade — real concerns, not farcical versions like Trump’s
invocation of national security to impose tariffs on Canadian aluminum — need
to be taken more seriously than I, among others, used to believe.
More
immediately, however, law-abiding nations need to show that they will not be
deterred from defending freedom. Autocrats may believe that financial exposure
to their authoritarian regimes will make democracies afraid to stand up for
their values. We need to prove them wrong.
And what that means in
practice is both that Europe must move quickly to cut off imports of Russian
oil and gas and that the West needs to supply Ukraine with the weapons it
needs, not just to hold Putin at bay, but to win a clear-cut victory. The
stakes here are much bigger than Ukraine alone.
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