Trump's AI Playbook Has Napoleon Written All Over It

Bloomberg

18-05-2025

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Throughout history, trade barriers have been double-edged swords. The problem is, if you initiate sanctions as a weapon, your enemies will inevitably find ways around them: wooing stronger friends, launching reciprocal punishments, finding black markets, sending in the Gungans, etc. When the Megarians of classical Greece were banned from Athenian markets because they trod on some goddess or other's sacred soil, they wooed Sparta and triggered the Peloponnesian War — which did not end well for democracy. Likewise, the Oil Shocks of the early 1970s spurred the US to (very slowly) innovate on fuel efficiency and (more immediately) trade in gas guzzlers for Japanese compacts and Detroit firetraps. And US sanctions against the Castros' Cuba have forced the little island to become self-sufficient in ventilators, condom-aged wine and washer-dryer coconut shredders.
But perhaps nobody learned this lesson in unintended consequences better than Le Petit Caporal himself. 1 Napoleon's Continental System, a pretty clever plan to shut Britain off from trade with Europe, is an object lesson. It might have seemed like the UK, an island nation at the mercy of trade, would be a pretty easy target for an embargo. But that's where the skill, bravery and abject cruelty of the Royal Navy come in. And Marc Isambard Brunel.