Autarky does not work-trade is better

See Wonking Out: Putin’s Other Big Miscalculation by Paul Krugman. Excerpts:

"Do we have historical examples of what happens when a trading nation is forced into autarky? Not many, precisely because it’s such an extreme event. You could say that something like this happened to Japan during World War II, especially after America captured Saipan and Guam in 1944. This put the U.S. submarine bases near Japan’s most crucial shipping routes and airfields close enough to bomb its ports, effectively isolating Japan’s economy from the rest of the world. Sure enough, Japan’s war economy imploded.

But what about autarky in a nation that wasn’t under direct military assault? Well, there’s a surprising — and surprisingly old — example from U.S. history.

America wasn’t a direct participant in the Napoleonic wars, a huge conflict that, among other things, led Britain to accumulate a remarkable amount of government debt:

The high cost of fighting Napoleon.Credit...FRED

But America was hardly immune to the effects of those wars, especially because both sides engaged in economic warfare, trying to cripple their opponent with economic blockades that also damaged U.S. commerce. Britain was also in the habit of stopping American commercial ships and impressing their sailors — that is, kidnapping them and forcing them to serve in the British navy.

In response, the administration of Thomas Jefferson tried to retaliate by cutting off all international shipping. Yes, we tried to extract concessions from Britain and France by imposing autarky on … ourselves.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t work. But it did impose large costs on the U.S. economy. Data for the early 19th century is, as you might guess, sketchy, but the economist and historian Douglas Irwin has tried to estimate the cost of the Jeffersonian embargo, which he places at about 8 percent of U.S. gross domestic product."