The stupidity of sanctions and blockades is blazingly obvious. We’ve been doing it since 1959, and it has strengthened our enemies every single time.

Until now I thought our 1959 blockade of Cuba was at least understandable, since we hadn’t done the experiment yet and didn’t know the inevitable result.

Nope, it wasn’t understandable. We had already seen the stupidity from a distance in 1918. Britain was trying the SAME FUCKING ROUTINE against Germany, and it failed. Britain was losing badly until we joined the MILITARY side of the war.

From a US government monograph on cryptography in WW1:

As the British General Staff wrote after the war, the ideal was to create “impaired military efficiency and exhausted national morale” and “so completely starve the enemy as to force him to come to terms by starvation.”

Sounds fucking familiar.

This aim was ambitious, and so were the means. During the Great War, pursuing this aim led Britain to intervene in the economy of every neutral country, and to struggle with most of the world’s firms.

Sounds fucking familiar.

Britain also needed to control exports of raw materials and manufactured goods from distant neutral polities, most notably the United States, but also Spain, and many countries and colonies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. These needs forced Britain into complex arrangements with foreign governments and great firms, which often had political power of their own.

Sounds fucking familiar.

We joined the war in 1918 BECAUSE Britain’s war, both economic and military, was failing. We KNEW that blockades were useless.