Welcome to Horns of A Dilemma, the podcast of the Texas National Security Review.

I'm Ryan Vest, executive editor of TNSR, and I'm here with our editor-in-chief, Dr.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens.

Today we have joining us national security scholar, Mariya Grinberg,

author of the book, "Trade in War: Economic Cooperation Across Enemy Lines." Mariya is an assistant professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mariya, welcome to Horns of A Dilemma.

Thank you very much for having me.

It's great to have you on the show.

Great to have you on with us today.

One of the things that I found fascinating about your book is that there is this conventional wisdom that trade and war are mutually exclusive, and your book really challenges the conventional wisdom that states simply stop trading with each other during wartime.

Can you take us back to the initial spark for the project and tell us a little bit about, you know, what moment or sort of set of questions first convinced you that this was what you wanted to write a whole book about.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good story for you.

The roots of the project are very, very commonplace.

I was helping some students in the cohort below mine prepare for their general exams and we got to the week on causes of war, what deters war, got around to the question of economic interdependence.

There's the general idea that the more states trade with each other, the more of a cost it is for them to lose that trade, the less likely they are to fight.

And I kind of got stuck on that middle part of it that you have to give up all of the trade during the war, started asking questions of, well, why is that?

Why is giving someone a big art piece in the middle of a war actually a problem?

I started talking to people about it and ran into a wall of, "states don't do this, that's insane.

It's counterproductive.

Of course, you don't help your enemies during the war." And then my, you know, contrarian nature took over and here we are.

How would you describe trade in war to a listener who's not familiar with international relations?

And I guess what I'm really getting at is what is the core question that you set out to answer in the book?

So I guess with most of, as with most of my research, I am trying to find very contradictory, counterintuitive, nonsensical-seeming policies and trying to find some reason behind them.

So for this specific book, the general question is why do states trade with their enemies during war?

And then sort of try to figure out why is this a rational behavior and how to explain it.

So before we go a little bit deeper into the details of that, I wanted to ask a little bit about just the main argument, because I think people may actually be surprised by the sort of baseline fact that you start the book out with, which is states actually do continue to trade with each other even when their militaries are fighting each other on the battlefield.

So war does not stop trade, especially in this day and age.

And you give a bunch of really interesting and compelling examples.

We'll try to come back to those in just a minute.

But, you know, this sort of core fact that drives the puzzle of the book, that states actually don't stop trading with each other even when they're fighting each other in war, how do you explain that?

What's the sort of short answer to why states continue to do this?

You talk about in the book, something that you call wartime trade theory.

What's the logic that drives the state to continue trading with the enemy?

Of course.

So the main argument, of course, is that states do in fact trade with their enemies during war.

Then the general idea is, well, what part of that trade actually continues?

And in order to answer that, states need to balance military and economic incentives.

So on the one hand, you want to maximize the military benefit of severing trade.

But on the other hand, you want to minimize the economic costs to cutting off that trade.

So that gives us basically two conditions under which wartime trade can exist.

First, trade can be permitted when it doesn't help the enemy win the current war.

And second, trade can be permitted when severing it doesn't affect the state's long-term security.

But we can take that, sort of, to one more level of specificity and say that a wartime commercial policy is actually set at the product level.

So for each given product, if the amount of time it takes to convert it into a military capability takes longer than you expect the war to last, then that trade can be permitted because it doesn't help the enemy win the current war.

And then, if the contribution of a product to a state's economy is greater than the level designated by the stakes of the specific war you're planning to fight, then states will protect the trade even during the war because it's important for their own long-term security.

That makes a lot of sense.

Now, in the book you talk about how commercial policy is a balance between both economic and security concerns, kind of like you've been saying.

Can you dig a little bit deeper into that, into these imperatives, and explain how they differ from the factors that drive trade policy during peace time, when battlefield outcomes aren't part of the equation?

Right.

So war in itself functions as a focusing mechanism.

So that's a very good thing about war, I suppose, funny as it is to say.

It filters every decision through the question of, how will this affect battlefield outcomes?

What will this do to the war effort, which allows a general trade policy, which is very complicated, full of a lot of different factors to

be condensed into just these two: security or military benefits, and then economic costs that go with them.

So on the military side, all gains from trade can be converted into military capabilities by your enemy, which means that in the middle of the war, the last thing you want is to be increasing what your enemy can do on the battlefield.

So the military incentive is to sever all trade.

Don't want to help your enemy.

But on the other hand, you have your economic imperative.

The economic imperative tells you, well, you also benefit from that trade, which means that the amount of revenue that that trade generates in your own economy, especially as traded products circulate through your economy, the state can channel that into the defense of the country.

So if you want to be able to protect your country in the long term, you need to maintain all of that trade.

So the imperative is to keep all trade with the enemy.

And the state has to figure out how to reconcile those two things.

Early on in the book, I think it's in the introduction, and I'm delighted that the book actually arrived in time for this podcast.

Congratulations.

It's just out, and we're really pleased to have you on campus and able to talk about it with the book here.

But early in the book you include a chart that illustrates the different reasons that a state might trade with an adversary during wartime.

And the key components are this idea of conversion time, which you sort of mentioned a minute ago— the period between when a product is traded and when it can actually be used to enhance the enemy's military capability.

So how do states sort of identify that particular inflection point?

And, maybe, could you give us an example of when or how a state makes that decision?

Yes, of course.

So in the abstract realm first, the idea is it takes time for an enemy to convert products into military capabilities.

So ultimately, all products can be converted into military capabilities, but there's a difference in time.

So if I were to hand you a gun, the amount of time it takes to convert that into military capabilities is just taking it to the battlefield.

Pretty short.

If I were to, say, give you a motorcycle wheel, you'd have to take that motorcycle wheel, get it to the factory, fit it around the motorcycle, get the motorcycle to the battlefield.

A little bit longer.

If I were to give you a, let's go with fine, semi-precious jewels.

You know, rubies, gemstones like that.

You would need to probably take it to a factory, set it into a jewelry piece, export that jewelry piece somewhere else.

Tax the process, get the benefits from it.

Use those benefits to buy a gun, get that gun to the battlefield.

Much, much longer process.

So given that products vary in how long it takes the enemy to convert it into the battlefield, not all trade is equally dangerous.

So if you expect the war to be particularly short, let's say three months, and the gemstone story takes about six months to convert into battlefield capabilities, you don't particularly mind trading in gemstones because your enemy will not be able to benefit from it in the current war.

On the other hand, the gun example, that's gonna take much shorter than the three months.

So you probably don't wanna be doing that.

So I'm curious, how does that work with just cash reserves?

For instance, if I am buying something from the enemy and giving them money, essentially, that's going to eventually end up in the coffers.

Does that work in the same way or does that take a longer time?

Shorter time?

How do you analyze that?

So it works in the, theoretically it works in the same way.

Time-wise, it depends on how the tax structure of the country is structured, because usually it's not states specifically that do the trading, it's the firms.

So in order for the state to benefit from that, they have to extract their cut from everything else.

So if two firms exchange something, one of the firms gets money, the state has to tax that.

The taxation period takes some amount of time.

By the time the state benefits from it, they can invest that into military capabilities.

So how should states be thinking about this, this time lag?

How does that affect strategic thinking between these two states?

So states can actually increase the conversion time of different products if they want to continue wartime trade during the war, which is kind of fun.

So for example, if I sell something to you directly, that takes a certain amount of time to transport the product.

If I send that product to you through a neighboring state, I can increase the amount of time it takes for you to get there, increasing the conversion time, allowing me to trade in more products because all of a sudden more products fall on the other side of that.

You'll only benefit from it once the war ends.

So I didn't think we were gonna go into this, but now I wanna ask, sorry for going down a little bit of a different direction here, but you know, you have these five case studies.

And you start with, I think, the Crimean War and then go all the way up to the present and maybe even a little bit of projecting into a couple of possible futures.

So there's a really impressive time span that you look at in which arguably the nature of warfare evolved or changed a little bit.

And one of the things that you talk about is the introduction of this idea of maritime neutral rights, which affects the ability to send things through a third country, or potentially to route things in ways that increase the conversion time.

Can you talk a little bit about how the changing environment around war affected the emergence of these rights and how that affected these trade calculations?

Absolutely.

That was one of the most fascinating discoveries for me as I was studying wartime trade— that everything actually centers on neutral rights, of all things, which I accidentally stumbled on because studying the Crimean War case, and the ice was too late to melt.

And because the ice was too late to melt in that particular year, France needed neutral rights in order to rescue its produce, starting this whole process down the line.

The neutral rights we care about are maritime neutral rights.

So the idea that flag covers merchandise, so if I put enemy products on a neutral ship, the neutral ship can get them to really anywhere in the world, and that can't be seized as contraband.

So the world before neutral rights were developed— in that world, the military benefits of severing wartime trade, very high.

The economic costs, fairly low.

Because anything that is basically on the open seas is open to seizure.

You're trading with the enemy, that can be seized.

Your neighbor's trading with your enemy, even if they're not involved in the war, that trade can be seized.

You can pretty much cut off your target from a lot of trade, and at the same time, you're making not only your own merchants, but merchants in all other countries pay the costs for this policy because their trade with the enemy is also severed.

The important thing is they can't take over your market share during the war.

We introduce neutral rights.

All of a sudden, neutrals can trade with your enemy while your own merchants cannot.

Military benefit, all of a sudden drops because your enemy can resupply from all of those neutral states.

Your own merchants can send products to those neutral states to then funnel back to the enemy state.

So military benefits drop and the economic costs are only really paid by your own merchants, whom you prevent to trade with the enemy.

Neutrals can all of a sudden take over your market share in the enemy state, which means that your losses during the war could even become permanent losses after the war.

All of a sudden states have to be a lot more nuanced in their wartime commercial policies, and every single time they sever trade, it has to be justified with high enough military benefit.

One of the things I found really interesting about the cases that you describe in the book is that states are actually pretty tactical once these neutral rights emerge, even calibrating the amount of trade or which sectors or industries they allowed to trade, products are allowed to trade, within the time span of a given war.

And so can you talk a little bit about these intrawar calculations and when a state might decide to change, and maybe tell us an example from the book where you talk about how a state in the middle of a war realized that it needed to change its wartime commercial policy and why?

Yeah.

Turns out states are really bad at figuring out what kind of wars they're about to fight.

For the most part, they tend to assume that they're going to be fighting very short, very easy wars.

And then about six months into the war, when the boys don't come home for Christmas, they're very surprised to find out that they're actually fighting longer wars or sometimes more existentially threatening wars, which of course affects their wartime commercial policies.

So I'll give you two of my favorite examples.

The first one comes from Britain in World War I.

When I was looking at its initial wartime commercial policy— so what was prohibited from trading with the enemy at the very start of the war— I was very surprised to find carriages for machine guns.

Machine guns themselves, you can trade with the enemy, no problem.

You wanna give the Germans a machine gun, by all means.

Carriages for machine guns though, not allowed.

So of course I had to dig into that because, what in the world is going on there?

And I found out that at the time there was this perception that machine guns could only be used for positional warfare.

So in a long war, when you're stuck in trenches, machine guns can provide you the kind of cover to make it useful to use in the war.

In a war of movement that they thought they were gonna start World War I with, in a very short, very quick war, machine guns would not be useful.

If you can find a way to make them mobile, thus the carriages for machine guns, then maybe they have military utility.

Otherwise, not so much.

So the start of the war, machine guns, trade with the enemy, by all means, allowed.

Now, as we know, World War I eventually got solidified into pretty decent trench lines.

The war got stuck and extended into a very, very long war.

At that point, around November of 1914, machine guns are prohibited from being traded with the enemy because now we're in a long kind of war where machine guns can provide utility for the enemy, so now they're prohibited from trade.

So that's an example of the length of war expanding.

I also have a fun example of what happens when the expectation of the length of war drops unexpectedly.

So this is Germany in World War I.

They, of course, always also started with an expectation of a short war.

But once the trenches solidify, they say, okay, we now have a two front war.

They're very unhappy about the situation, they're expecting a long war.

In this long war, they prohibit all trade with the enemy and with a lot of neutral states in the dye industry.

Now dyes for Germany at this point is a major industry.

It's very important for their economy, and it's mostly an export industry.

So about only 10% of the industry is required to cover domestic demand.

So very important industry for them.

I should also mention, so dyes are used obviously in the textile industry to dye the different textiles, but they're also used for some military applications like varnishing ships.

Some of them are used in explosives.

So Germans control this trade, while they expect a long war, very, very stringently.

In 1917 there is a period of short war expectation where Germans expect that the unrestricted submarine warfare will starve Britain to the extent where they'd be willing to pull out of the war, and they think that this will be the linchpin which will end the war for them within six months.

Given this short war expectation.

They start a very daring scheme where they allow very controlled direct trade with the enemy in these dyes, so long as they can get huge exorbitant profits from it.

So the idea is, now that the enemy can't benefit from the dyes in the six months that are left of this war, we're okay handing it to them because they're all going to be so in need of it, because we've been starving them of these products for the past three years, that they'd be willing to pay us such a high premium on it, that we'd be able to invest that into paying off our own war loans.

So in expectation of the war shrinking, all of a sudden trading with the enemies relaxed.

That's really interesting.

It goes both ways, even in the middle of a war as expectations change.

In liberal war IR theory, we talk a lot about how trade interdependence might be able to stop wars or to limit wars.

In your book, you make the opposite assertion.

You write that economic interdependence may be insufficient to keep states from war, as a lot of the theorists claim.

The idea there being that trade can continue selectively even during hostilities.

You also argue that globalization, complex supply chains, and the prevalence of intermediate goods have made wartime trade even more likely, which goes against a lot of what scholars talk about.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why that is, especially in this era of great power competition.

Yeah.

One of the, I guess less positive aspects for the world is the conclusion that trade can't really deter conflict.

Or rather trade can deter, but only long existentially threatening conflicts.

And in the era of great power competition, when we're talking about states that have secure second strike nuclear capabilities, long existential struggles are already deterred by something that has a much higher deterrence value.

The way that I think about this at the very basic level is that it's the exact same people in the state who make the decision to go to war as the decision to allow wartime trade.

So if we're considering the costs of severed trade as a deterrent for war, the person who is calculating the costs can turn the tap and say, okay, fine.

I will now allow wartime trade, decreasing that cost.

Now that doesn't really work too much as a deterrent because I get to control how much of that cost there is in the decision to start the war.

So unfortunately, I don't think trade is going to do a lot for us in order to deter conflict.

So that's a really sobering finding, and I wanted to follow up a little bit because it, I've been part of some discussions that have been taking place over the course of the last year or two on the US-China relationship and the fear that the US military's sort of theory of victory and probably the PLA's theory about how it might fight a conflict, which hinges on this idea that a war could be short, and a decisive sort of early victory will limit the temporal span of any conflict.

And there's been a lot of concern that that's a false hope, that a US-China conflict could become protracted, could be grinding.

I realize that we're not yet in a wartime commercial policy formulation window, right?

Thank goodness, we all hope we never get there.

But what can your book tell us about how policy makers might either be thinking through that now, the deterrent role of trade in the US-China relationship?

Or, how they might make decisions if that moment we hope doesn't come, but if it did, how they would approach the problem.

Right, so I guess I'll start with two very quick disclaimers.

So as you've mentioned, the wartime trade theory only explains how processes work in war.

The war itself is important because it simplifies things down to just that security and economic trade off.

In peace time there's all sorts of other factors that go into commercial policy, which can sometimes sort of rejigger that balance so that it's still worthwhile to do certain things, even if just the military and economic trade off tells you that it's not.

But if we were to look purely at just the economic and military trade off, when it comes to peacetime trade, there's very little military benefit from severing a lot of trade to justify the economic costs.

And the reason for this is, very literally, all of the other states in the world.

So the US-China relationship is not just the US-China relationship when it comes to trade.

There's all of the other states in the world.

So what I mean is, it is very profitable to be an intermediary between two states that sever direct trade ties between themselves.

Right?

It is very profitable to take something from you and to give it to you because I can now profit from this trade, and all I have to do is quite literally facilitate the transport.

And we've seen these kinds of transshipment processes happening during conflicts, short of war.

So for example, when Donald Trump had his trade war with China in the first administration.

When tariffs rose particularly high, direct trade between the United States and China depressed, but a lot of products from China went to Vietnam, went to the United States.

A lot of products from the United States, went to Vietnam, went to China.

Vietnam gets to profit from this.

United States and China get to pay the costs.

Military benefit, well, they're still getting the products.

The same thing when the United States put sanctions on Russia during the Russia- Ukraine War, right?

A lot of the products then went through Turkey to Russia.

So again, Turkey gets to benefit, the United States and Russia get to pay the costs, but the products still get from one country to the other.

So the military benefits, fairly low or not there at all.

The economic costs are high, so in that trade off the military benefits themselves alone don't seem high enough to justify the economic costs.

Really interesting.

So I want to pull on that just a little bit more.

You know, you talked about Russia and Ukraine.

One of my favorite Russian theorists is Alexander Svechin, and he wrote a whole chapter in his book on strategy where he talked about the Anglo-American tool of economic warfare and tariffs.

I was wondering, is there a flip side to this that we should be thinking about with trade?

Is there a way that countries can use that as a type of economic warfare?

Or is this just not worth the trouble?

It depends on whether you're using those tools in wartime or in peace time.

So if the United States and England are both belligerent, like they were say in World War I and in World War II, towards the end of the war, the amount of damage they can do to the global economy is monumental, right?

What England was doing to the global economy at the end of World War II is practically bringing it to a standstill, checking products and specific ships, and then right, letting it either sail or not sail.

But that's because belligerent rights in war allow them to do that.

In peace time, most of those would be seen as acts of war.

So in peace time, the amount of leverage you have over the economy drops considerably.

So the United States right now, to even prevent other countries from trading with their enemies, has to institute things like secondary sanctions.

Secondary sanctions are just the idea that I sanction the intermediary in addition to the target for conducting this trade.

They're very inflammatory.

They are, they make a lot of states very, very angry for obvious reasons.

You're interfering with their sovereign decision to conduct their own trade policy.

So the enforcement costs are incredibly high.

So if the United States and England want to control the economy to that extent, they have to pay a lot of costs for it, which again, require pretty substantial military benefit to make it worthwhile.

So one of the things I found really interesting about your book is that I'm used to thinking of trade policy, particularly in the US context, as really heavily shaped by domestic politics.

We had Michael Beman out here from Stanford last year talking about the changes in US trade policy over the course of the last several decades, and domestic politics play a big part in that story, the story that he tells.

But I was actually really interested in how that works in this framework, because that's very much a peacetime story.

And so I wanted to ask you, are there cases where those domestic political pressures or domestic interest groups and constituencies still play a role in how the government shapes its wartime commercial policies?

Or are the pressures of war really so acute that that whole dynamic that shapes trade policy on a normal day just sort of drops away in the crucible of war?

Yeah, that's an excellent question.

At the very large scale aspect, the domestic politics falls away during the war.

I have a collection of lovely letters from pithy British politicians sending off responses to merchants requesting specific policies that quite literally say, we're conducting a war here, leave us alone.

But that doesn't mean that domestic politics stopped mattering completely.

So politicians generally lack a lot of in-depth industry information that only domestic lobbying efforts can provide them.

So a lot of times, what I've noticed is politicians don't so much respond to sort of requests for specific products to be traded or not traded during the war, but they extract information from that about product differentiation.

So for example, if they make a prohibition that's too broad, like for example, if they prohibit trade in all iron.

And then merchants sort of send them letters and saying, well, what do you mean all iron?

We have pig iron, we have white iron tea linings, we have iron pipe of three ninth diameter for, you know, ship building compared to four ninth diameter for construction of buildings.

And they say some of this has military applications, but other stuff really, really doesn't.

So what policymakers can do is take this information and make their policy even more nuanced and say, what we actually want to prohibit is the lead that is being used to make guns, which we can describe by thank you industry giving us the right diameter width of the pipe, now that's prohibited.

All of the other stuff that is used for domestic consumption, that is used for non-war related stuff that the military will have a longer time converting into military capabilities, that can now be traded with the enemy because we don't think it'll help the enemy win.

So in that respect, they're still extracting benefit from the lobbying efforts, just not in the same way that it works in peacetime commercial policy.

So to pull this into, you know, what's going on in the world around us now, applying your framework to the Russia-Ukraine War, what can the coexistence of sanctions and continued trade during wartime tell us about the compatibility or the adaptability of economic relationships and the limits of economic coercion and wartime, as we've seen quite a bit of trade that's still flowing between the two countries and across Ukraine?

Again, one of the complications here is that the United States and Europe are not really belligerent in the conflict.

It's really hard to call them neutral, but legally speaking, they try to maintain this position of neutrality.

Because they're not actually physically involved in the conflict, for them, the stakes of the war are fairly low— so lower for the United States than there are for Europe.

And of course there are differences amongst the different European states as well, but compared to Ukraine, the stakes for the war for them are much lower.

Because the stakes are fairly low, the amount of trade they want to protect to make sure that their economy is functioning correctly so they can invest it into their own security is pretty substantially high.

So that's one of the largest reasons for why sanctions have such a hard time affecting the Russian war effort, because a lot of these actors feel the need to protect their own economies, even in this conflictual situation.

Which makes perfect sense for them, right?

For them the stakes are fairly low, and because they're fairly low, they can maintain, focus on maintaining their own long-term security as opposed to helping with the current war effort.

I'm curious how that works between, not looking so much at the west, but looking at just Ukraine and Russia.

We still see gas and oil flowing across Ukraine, both from Russia and Turkey.

And there is some limited trade going on between the two countries, which I think a lot of people will be surprised in such a bitter war to see trades still continuing.

How does your book, or what can we learn from your book about what's going on there?

How does it tell us or help us understand this very complex relationship?

So at the start of the war, as we would expect, it's mostly products that take a long time to be converted into military capabilities.

As we all remember, sort of at the start of the conflict, no one thought it was going to last for a particularly long amount of time.

If I understand correctly, no one so much has bothered to set a wartime commercial policy from the Russian side because they expected it to be a fairly quick operation.

So there's not all that much that would have helped the enemy win in that particular war.

On the Ukrainian side, it also took them a while to start putting in policies to prevent any kind of trade with Russia.

But what remains in terms of trade now are things that are required for the economy to keep on running.

So things that are very important to the Ukrainian economy, things that are very important to the Russian economy.

So basically, even in a long war, you still need the economy to function long enough to support your war effort.

It feels like we're in a moment where both the global economy, particularly the global economics of trade and the global security environment, are evolving fairly quickly.

And so I wondered are there any areas, either, you know, sort of new economic sectors or new types of a global security environment that would challenge or change any of the things that you talk about in the book?

I guess another way of asking the question is.

How would you want policymakers to try to take this framework and adapt it to the world we're living in today, or that we might be heading into tomorrow?

Oh, those are two very different questions.

The second, much harder answer than the first.

So in terms of, do I see any changes in the way that the economy is structured that sort of affect these policies?

I think so far the answer is not really, other than possibly to make wartime trade more likely.

So some of the recent changes in the global economy are things like countries are becoming more specialized by being part of supply chains.

So a country might be focused on making raw materials, exporting them somewhere that turn those raw materials into intermediate goods.

And then intermediate goods are made into finished products elsewhere.

So, I'm not going to give you the number because I'll probably get it wrong, but a majority of world trade right now is made up of this trade in intermediate products.

If you think about it, intermediate products, by their very definition, have a fairly long conversion time because they have to be made into finished goods before they can be used for anything else.

If conversion time is extended, thou, we need wars to last longer for wartime trade to stop in those particular goods.

Which means that if a lot of our trade right now has long conversion times, chances are, if we're expecting short wars, a lot more wartime trade.

A lot of trade right now happens in services, but services themselves are connected to specific products.

So usually services are things like, in the military world, maintenance of equipment, for example.

Services could be you have this particular equipment, but I need to create some sort of program to make it work, to make the computer in it function.

That also extends conversion time to some extent, because you don't need maintenance on a new product.

You usually need maintenance on something that has already broken down, so send it in, fix it up, send it back.

Conversion times extend, you need a longer war in order for wartime trade to stop.

Anything that requires a long war, most states generally try to avoid, or at least they start with the expectation that war is going to be short, no matter how wrong they are about that.

And then all of a sudden a lot more wartime trade.

That's fascinating.

Lots to think about there.

Thank you.

So I've kind of hit the bottom of my question list here.

Is there anything that we haven't covered yet that you want to bring out about the book?

Hmm.

I guess, just purely out of fun examples, the only other fun thing that I found is, there is more than one way for states to control wartime trade.

So sometimes they do it through these general policies, if you're allowed to trade to and you're not allowed to trade.

Sometimes they grant specific licenses for trade, which make for a lot of fun examples of, even in existentially threatening situations, you can still see a little note from a state saying you, firm, are allowed to bring in, you know, three specific gidgets that are required for your machine that can only be made by the enemy, because we know that that machine is very important for you to function in order to continue the economy going.

So one of the favorite examples, where most of my fascination with this came from, hosiery needles, which took me a while to figure out.

So it's this little metal piece, little long piece of metal that has a latch hook at the end of it that goes into a knitting machine that you sort of run a caribiner over and it creates textiles for you.

It turns out that Germans were the only ones that had the precision technology to make these in World War I.

So even as England is fighting an existentially threatening war against Germany, they're pulling out all of these licenses to specific merchants saying, you there, you can find a way to extract these specific things from your enemy because we need this for our textile industry.

Fascinating.

It's fascinating how there are those little carve outs in there that economies need to be able to survive.

And it's all in service of making sure that we can fight the war longer.

That's really interesting, and it's fun to see these unexpected moments that come out of archival research or come out of the documents that you look at that are not always what you might expect.

And certainly there was a lot in the book that I didn't expect in reading through and really wrapping my head around this whole concept of wartime commercial policy.

So we really appreciate you coming on today to be able to talk with us about the book.

Congratulations on having it out, and we're really glad to have you here to share it with us.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mariya.

Well, thank you for joining us on Horns of a Dilemma from the Texas National Security Review.

Our guest today has been Mariya Grinberg, author of the book, "Trade in War." Mariya, thank you very much for joining us today.

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Today's episode was produced by TNSR Digital and Technical Manager Jordan Morning and made possible by The University of Texas System.

This is Ryan Vest and Sheena Greitens.

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