ABSTRACT
This chapter traces some of the main thinking that contributed to Peter Wilson’s, and, particularly, Herbert Hoover’s belief that economic statecraft would work against Russia. Economic statecraft as a policy option has gone through a number of phases since 1918 as a way of putting pressure on states that refuse to behave according to the rules of international, and has had a reincarnation with sanctions directed against Serbia and Montenegro in former Yugoslavia. The cause of the First World War was the progressive dissolution from 1900 on of the liberal economic system and all attempts to resurrect it in the 1920s were doomed to failure, so that “by 1940 every vestige of the international system had disappeared”. Wilson’s Fourteen Points had among them some key economic demands, including freedom of the seas for commerce, the removal of economic barriers to trade, with the reduction of armamants and decolonisation having a strong economic element.
