Percy Did It
There is a simple test for whether a foreign policy approach works: does it produce the outcome it claimed to be pursuing? By that measure, war has an almost unblemished record of failure.
Korea froze. Vietnam was lost to a country with a fraction of America's GDP. Cuba outlasted every attempt to remove it. In Afghanistan, twenty years of occupation ended with the Taliban walking back in within weeks of the last helicopter leaving. In Iraq, the Americans created a state now economically dependent on Iran, which sells most of its oil to China — an outcome so far from the stated objectives as to constitute a kind of dark comedy. And in Iran, a small, poor country under American sanctions for forty-seven years has turned what Israel and America apparently planned as a swift operation into a months-long demonstration that punishment, applied externally, tends to harden rather than soften its targets.
The pattern is not ambiguous. Military force generates costs — in lives, in money, in the enemies it creates — and delivers results that range from negligible to actively counterproductive.
The Marshall Plan is the awkward fact that sits in the middle of all this. The war didn't rebuild Germany — the money did. Of the $13.3 billion distributed, roughly ninety percent was issued as outright grants, not loans. This was a deliberate choice. The architects of the plan had watched what happened after the last war, when debt reparations crushed Germany and fed the conditions for the next one. They decided not to repeat it. The result restored a country that had been among the world's leading manufacturers to something approaching what it had been. In Japan, the Americans redistributed land — 5.8 million acres of it, roughly 38% of the country's cultivated farmland, transferred from landlords to the people who worked it, raising the share of self-owned farmland from 51 to 89 percent — understanding that if they didn't act in what they freely admitted was a communist manner, the communists would. Both worked. The wars themselves hadn't. The lesson from the rubble was not that more bombs were needed. It was that building things is more effective than destroying them.
There is an irony here that deserves stating plainly. The country currently most enthusiastic about tariffs invented itself as a free trade zone. The United States began as an experiment in common market economics: thirteen separate colonies, different interests, different products, bound into a single trading area where a manufacturer in Chicago could sell to a buyer in New York without a toll booth in between. That integration — not military conquest, not sanctions, not punitive trade policy — is what built American prosperity.
The European Union looked at that model and applied it to a continent that had spent centuries trying to kill itself. The countries that reduced each other's cities to rubble in the first half of the twentieth century discovered, in the second half, that trading with each other was considerably more profitable than fighting. France and Germany have not gone to war since they started selling each other things in volume. Neither has anyone else within the bloc. Seven decades of peace between nations that spent centuries periodically at each other's throats is not an accident. It is a result.
The mechanism is not complicated. Trade creates mutual dependency. If your economy is interlocked with mine, my collapse damages you, and yours damages me. War is a destruction of value on both sides — it just distributes the destruction unevenly. The victor gets to call the rubble a victory.
This is not a new discovery. The Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 imposed tariffs across the board, triggered retaliatory measures from every major trading partner, and reduced much of the world to penury without the need for a single bomb. It is one of the more efficient acts of self-destruction in economic history — a country contracting itself into depression through a theory of trade that the preceding century had already thoroughly discredited. The lesson was eventually learned, at enormous cost, and underpinned the entire postwar settlement: the GATT, the WTO, the trading blocs, the EU. The architecture of postwar prosperity was, at its foundation, an agreement not to do Smoot-Hawley again.
Someone didn't get the memo. There are persistent rumours that the man responsible does not read. And that the people around him who can are too frightened to tell him. Which would explain a great deal — including why a tariff policy last tried in 1930, and last seen disappearing over the horizon trailing a global depression behind it, has been retrieved and presented as innovation.
The abstract becomes specific quickly. A friend's brother moved back to Indiana, to the town where he grew up, and found his childhood friends being laid off from the factories where they'd spent their working lives. Not because the factories were inefficient. Not because the market had moved on. Because the tariffs being applied to their inputs had made it too expensive to keep the lines running. And — remarkably — they continue to support the man responsible.
This is perhaps the most remarkable feature of the whole affair: the direct victims of the policy remain among its most committed supporters. The factory is closed, the wage is gone, and the faith is intact. There is something almost theological about it — a devotion that survives and is perhaps even deepened by evidence of its failure. The punishment feels righteous even when it lands on you.
This did not happen in a vacuum. At the same time that Britain was dismantling the postwar consensus — the NHS, social housing, the unions, the idea that the state owed its citizens something — America was dismantling the legacy of Roosevelt: the New Deal, the programmes that had pulled the country out of the Depression that Smoot-Hawley helped create.
It is worth being precise about what was dismantled, because the caricature doesn't serve the argument. The postwar settlement was not a Labour imposition that Conservatives merely tolerated. It was genuinely cross-party. Macmillan, as Housing Minister, built more council houses than Labour had. The term coined for the era was Butskellism — a portmanteau of Butler, the Conservative Chancellor, and Gaitskell, his Labour shadow — because their economic policies were sufficiently similar that they could be merged into a single word. When Macmillan said in 1957 that most people had never had it so good, he was stating something that was, by the measures available, true — and he said it during a pandemic. The Asian flu killed a million people worldwide that year. The welfare state held. The point of the postwar settlement was precisely that it held when things went wrong. What Thatcher dismantled was not a party political project. It was a national one.
The results, in both cases, were predictable. You get poverty. And when you get poverty, you get people who need someone to blame — and who find that punishing someone else feels like an answer. The tariff is a punishment. The factory worker laid off by the tariff still believes in punishment. The bayonet, as ever, has a worker on each end.
The logical destination of this thinking has a name: autarky. The economic policy of national self-sufficiency — producing everything domestically, minimising dependence on foreign trade — was a cornerstone of fascist economics. Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy both pursued it. It is, in effect, tariffs taken to their logical conclusion, and it doesn't work for the same reason that tariffs don't work: no country can produce everything efficiently, and the attempt to try impoverishes everyone. The slogan writes itself. Sinn Féin. Ourselves alone.
David Partridge, Bridport. mail@stpd.net · stpd.net
This site is updated when something stupid needs saying. Started February 2026. For what might actually work, see snsbl.org