Lessons from Napoleon on how economic warfare can seriously backfire

French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte famously blockaded the British during the early 19th century in an attempt to economically coerce France’s erstwhile adversary. Ultimately, his efforts backfired, contributing to his eventual capitulation in 1815. Today, in 2025, leaders looking to use economic isolation against geopolitical rivals would do well to heed the lessons offered by Napoleon’s failed foray.

In 1806, as part of his multi-front war with Great Britain, Napoleon launched the “Continental System”, whereby European countries were banned from trading with Britain. The island state’s rapid population growth during the Industrial Revolution had raised its demand for food, while technological advancement meant that agriculture now competed with manufacturing for land use.

As a result, Britain was more dependent than ever on food imports – and hence more susceptible to the pain caused by a disruption to those supply chains. Moreover, the continent was a critical outlet for British manufactured goods, which in turn financed the all-conquering British navy. For the French emperor, this presented an opportunity to coerce the British without the logistical challenges of an amphibious assault.

On the surface, it is easy to see why this approach was so appealing to Napoleon. No country that depends as heavily as the British did on international trade can resist a blockade indefinitely. Moreover, having recently expanded his empire with devastating speed, Napolean imagined that getting European businesses and citizens to comply with the embargo required no more than issuing the order. An added feature of the Continental System is that it nominally reduced the need for military confrontation, with Britain’s pocket being deemed weaker than its sword.

In the increasingly quasi-lawless international relations of the 21st century, many of these expectations are shared by leaders looking to coerce rival countries through economic pressure, and to avoid the need to deploy expensive military hardware in an uncertain and rapidly evolving battlefield. However, like Napoleon, they, too, are finding out that the use of extreme trade barriers does not always yield the desired results.

More specifically, one of the key weaknesses in Napoleon’s approach was his overestimation of the ease of enforcing the embargo. Allies and vassal states did not take kindly to being ordered to cease trade with the British since they had fundamentally different interests to those of the fast-expanding French nation.

That created fertile ground for smuggling, forcing Napoleon to redirect valuable military resources away from the battlefields towards the mundane and vexing task of enforcing an embargo. Moreover, even when his efforts were successful in limiting trade with Great Britain, the result was significant economic pain – in the form of acute key commodity shortages – in the countries being forced to toe the line.

Napoleon also underestimated Britain’s resourcefulness in developing alternative trade partnerships. Across the Atlantic Ocean, then-US president Thomas Jefferson – fed up with impressment and piracy by British and French-aligned navies – initially imposed a comprehensive embargo on Europe.

However, he eventually relented due to the adverse consequences on the US economy, inadvertently providing the British with a valuable lifeline. Put short, Britain remained resilient, while France weakened its own allies and provoked resentment among its coalition.

In 2025, the odds are arguably even more in favour of the country being targeted with economic isolation. The unipolar world of the 1990s is dead, and in its stead has emerged a multipolar configuration where no country wields sufficient influence to economically cripple a sizable adversary.

Too many other countries correctly perceive the profitability of helping the targeted country out through the maintenance of trade relations, and regard undermining the blockading state as either an acceptable cost of doing business or even a welcome act of defiance.

A further complication is that supply chains are now much more integrated and complex than at any other time in history. This amplifies the risk of an embargo having a counterproductive effect on the imposing country, while also accentuating the fallout among friends and foes alike as they reel from the instability.

Moreover, while Napoleon’s navy had the option of explicit military coercion aided by an acute asymmetry in combat capabilities, in today’s world of airborne and seaborne drones, a blockading ship that costs hundreds of millions of dollars can be impaired or even sunk at the cost of a few thousand dollars.

The above, however, does not imply that economic coercion is useless. Instead, it affirms the importance of embedding it in a credible, multilateral economic strategy that involves both carrots and sticks for participating nations. A well-structured plan that has buy-in from a large international coalition can still be effective, whereas banging one’s fist on the table and demanding compliance is unlikely to work.

Napoleon thought he could starve Britain into submission, but it was his own empire that went hungry. Policymakers today should take note before setting another blockade that backfires.