America’s dumbest war (no, not this one)

A Republican president, one who muses about adding Canada to the United States, erects trade barriers to punish America’s rivals and ignite domestic manufacturing.

Instead, he does grievous harm to the U.S. economy.

Frustrated, the United States launches a war of choice.

Despite promises of a quick and decisive military triumph, the conflict drags on.

The president’s rosy predictions of imminent victory are so divorced from reality critics fear he has lost his mind.

The parallels between the War of 1812 and America’s conflict with Iran are striking—and the economic echoes are as noteworthy as the political ones.

The embargo that President Thomas Jefferson imposed on Britain and France in the runup to the War of 1812 cratered U.S. exports by roughly 80% and imports by nearly 60% within a year—a self-inflicted wound that plunged the young nation into depression before a single shot was fired at Britain.

Trump’s tariffs haven’t done that much damage, but they’ve still raised core goods prices by an estimated 3.1% and are projected to shave 0.4% off long-run GDP and cost roughly 345,000 full-time jobs, according to the Tax Foundation.

Then, as now, the American pressure campaign preceded a war that made the economic picture considerably worse: Once the fighting between the United States and Britain started, a blockade by the Royal Navy compounded the embargo’s damage in 1813-14, just as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—which the International Energy Agency calls the largest oil-supply disruption in history—has kept energy markets on edge through the current war.

Most Americans are only dimly aware of the War of 1812, the country’s first as an independent nation.

Those who can remember the name of the war at least know when it started.

Some might remember that it birthed the Star-Spangled Banner, or that it made General Andrew Jackson a household name, putting him on a path to the presidency.

But vanishingly few Americans know why we started a war with Great Britain 214 years ago, and what we got out of it.

That’s largely because the answers are 1) no good reason and 2) basically nothing.