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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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More seriously, a blockade is an act of war. Arguably, it is not only an act of war against the country being blockaded, but also against any neutral country who wants to peacefully trade with the blockaded country.

This doesn't follow.

The UK blockaded Germany during WW1 and WW2, and it's not like this was the UK was declaring war on the entire world by doing so. The US is just moving to option 4 in the escalation ladder list. Blockading a country from trading with neutrals is generally seen as acceptable wartime behavior, and although it can cause consternation with 3rd parties, it's not seen as overtly hostile to them.

The UK did not have to declare war on the rest of the world because the rest of the world was in no position to break their blockade.

Germany tried something similar with their unrestricted submarine warfare. Now you can argue that this was less of a proper blockade (U-boots are not suitable for searching vessels for contraband, so their only option is to sink any vessels). Still, it is kinda the same thing.

The US was very much not considering the sinking of their trade vessels as blockade runners a legitimate tactic, and rather promptly declared war on Germany. I have met few people who consider this an error in judgement. Sinking the ships of any nation is likely to piss them off and attack you.

If one Latin American country was blockading another one and courteously informing the US to keep their merchant vessels out of the blockade zone, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the US would simply shrug and say 'well blockades are a legitimate wartime tactic, they surely mean no hostility towards us'. Instead they would send a carrier group.

Also, both the U-boot warfare and the blockade of Germany would be war crimes by the standards of today, because we have decided that using hunger as a weapon of war is bad. From this, one could construct an argument that a belligerent should be allowed to sell sufficient civilian goods to earn the funds to buy humanitarian goods for their population.

Personally, I find broad economic blockades distasteful because they are simply not very targeted measures. It is basically like bombing a tenement and hoping that some of the people you hit happen to be enemy soldiers. Targeted blockades (for example, rf transceivers used in drones) seem a lot less bad -- though obviously also hard to pull off, because a single container of rf transceivers will probably supply the Iranian army for a long time.

Germany tried something similar with their unrestricted submarine warfare. Now you can argue that this was less of a proper blockade (U-boots are not suitable for searching vessels for contraband, so their only option is to sink any vessels).

I need to re-read Admiral Bauer's Das Unterseeboot, but despite his rather obvious bias, he makes two credible points: the German blockade should have been considered legitimate, and Germany should have never made the concession that its submarines follow the rules of cruiser warfare early on.

Sinking the ships of any nation is likely to piss them off and attack you.

That doesn’t seem to be the case these days, at least when Iran is the one sinking the ships.

Unrestricted submarine warfare was very much not the same thing. It was obviously departing from existing blockade law; the debates were over how much could and should be done to enforce those laws. Note that the first few incidents were handled with reparations and apologies rather than a declaration of war.

In your hypothetical, the U.S. might or might not choose to respect the blockade. We have that privilege. This does not provide a general argument for or against such tactics.