Don’t grow food, go for other raw materials instead. Don’t even be afraid to run out of food even, it only damages your money income and less so than what it might cost to buy food
True, their damage potential is limited relative to a conventional blitz, but Papers Please was long ago; Fortify hadn't even been nerfed at that point. And Arrgh survived that war along with I don't even know how many other wars.
Extorting is even better than turreting, sure, but turreting is awesome and that's a fact
This kind of thing has been suggested before, and the primary problem is that national approval doesn't have a cap, so anyone that's been through a good global war either has upwards of +400% or below -800% approval rating and that doesn't even make sense. Basically, we'd have to rejigger the way approval works first.
Scissors in your metaphor would be turreting/dogpiling, waging war with the objective of causing damage and thus slowing farming growth. Which elite alliances are good at, so I agree with your point.