the.com/blockade
Winning a war by making everyone too hungry to fight back.
means A military action that seals off a place by force, cutting off the movement of goods, people, or supplies to pressure or starve those inside into submission.
from Built from 'block' — to obstruct or bar — with the suffix '-ade,' the same ending found in 'barricade' and 'cannonade,' which English borrowed largely through French and Spanish to lend a martial, action-noun ring. 'Block' itself traces back through Old French to a Germanic root meaning a log or lump (think of a blocking log jammed in a doorway). So a 'blockade' is, quite literally, the act of throwing a great obstructing mass across someone's path — only here the path is a harbor or a border, and the obstruction is a wall of ships and guns.
- origin
- From Dutch blokkade, meaning to obstruct or block
- naval star
- Strangling ports has decided wars for centuries
- berlin airlift
- Soviet blockade beaten by 277,000 cargo flights
- legal line
- International law deems some blockades acts of war
- runner's game
- Blockade-runners turned smuggling into a lucrative wartime trade
berlin blockade — soviet union cut off west berlin from 1948-1949, prompting allied airlift of 2.3 million tons of supplies
cuban missile crisis blockade — us naval quarantine of cuba in october 1962 during nuclear standoff with soviet union
yemen blockade — saudi-led coalition imposed air and sea blockade on houthi-controlled territory starting 2015