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After the End of HistoryAuthor: After the 'End of History'
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Geoeconomics and the Future of Sanctions: Interview with Nicholas Mulder
Thursday, 12 February, 2026
Nicholas Mulder is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Cornell University. His previous book is The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War and he is currently close to completion on a book entitled The Age of Confiscation: Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World. He also started a Substack last year which contains some of the best commentary on the geo-economic conflicts unfolding before our eyes, often with very useful historical analogies for thinking about sanctions, embargoes and tariffs. It is called WeltinnenPolitik. It is hard to imagine a book being published at a more perfect time than Nicholas Mulder’s 2022 book The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. After the start of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent announcements of massive US-NATO sanctions against Russia, many of us turned to Mulder’s book to try to make sense of our period of great power tensions, economic and technological competition, and major war in Europe. The Economic Weapon brought readers a fresh and technical analysis for interpreting the breakdown of peace in the interwar period and the dashing of liberal visions of international cooperation. Most importantly, Mulder’s book did not just reaffirm the well-known cliches of liberal orthodoxy about free societies versus totalitarianism, but situated economic sanctions as a paradoxical tool of coercion and warfare - sometimes conceived as preventing war, while other times as precipitating it. His story begins with the efforts of British naval officials and financial authorities during WWI to leverage British naval power to enforce a blockade against the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The central paradox of his narrative is how a tool originally designed to escalate a total war strategy and coerce civilian populations would come to be thought of as a tool in preventing aggression in the League of Nations. While sometimes effective, Mulder also shows how diplomatic wrangling, ideological competition and the Great Depression often blunted multilateral commitment to use the economic weapon properly. And fear of sanctions by the late 1930s itself became a driver of strategic visions that saw territorial expansion as the only way to secure the energy, food and extractive resources that could maintain the viability of revisionist states. While far from any kind of apologia for the actions taken by the Axis powers, there is something in your account of the spirit of AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War in which the Allied Powers are not absolved of some blame. Support the show
