You are punishing people for rolling poorly on the parental lottery.
Some kid starving to death because of sanctions doesn't understand what's happening. Their parents will be too poor and hungry to meaningfully fight back against their leaders.
It's only going to hurt the vulnerable people in a country - militaries and oligarchs will not be impacted unless you target them specifically and narrowly.
Imagine if China said, "we're no longer shipping electronics to America and will not do business with anyone who does". You and I would experience huge jumps in costs and probably be angry at China, not our own government. But you probably aren't going to take up arms up being down your own government.
Specific sanctions (no electronics for Russia) very much impact militaries and industry. This does not affect current stocks, but affects the ability to build new stuff.
Broad sanctions slow down economy and affect target state's ability to afford stuff which very much impacts the military.
If China said "we're no longer shipping electronics to America and will not do business with anyone who does" China would collapse pretty quickly, because they need to manufacture and sell things in order to afford food. They would also not be able to buy oil and coal and other things they need.
Basically nothing you said is true, but most of all, worrying about Russian civilians (who almost all support the war) while Russian soldiers are raping, murdering and looting left and right is just disgusting.
The belief in sanctions is the belief that the dollar is the one world currency - the silver coin. It’s fixed exchange rate thinking long after that went away
All that needs to happen for people to be fed is for there to be a circular economy in agriculture that produces a vast surplus.
Both China and Russia can do that internally now and certainly between themselves.
China and Russia has no need to sell anything outside of China and Russia. A simple Yuan-Rouble floating exchange rate will work just fine.
The people that lose out are those that can no longer access Chinese and Russian output in return for mere electronic promises. That’s the net importers of the West.
Being a net importer is great. Net exporters sell their goods, getting way less than they produced and sold. What happens with your foreign currency reserves in times of high inflation like now? They rapidly devalue.
If sanctions don't work, is there hypothetically a number of years after which USA should drop the sanctions? How many more years of sanctions on the people of Cuba?
You can see sanctions work - both in specific effects (e.g. a factory producing missiles has to stop since it can't get chips) and in some macroeconomic effects - though those are harder to disentangle from the general chaos of everything.
It is much harder to see sanctions not work, how would you even discern that?
As for Cuba, I have no idea what USA is doing there.
Your last paragraph lost me.
Every country has rapers, murderers and (when given the opportunity - eg even recently, and very probably, still, in the Ukraine) looters.
Especially in the military.
Calling 'worrying about...civilians', 'disgusting', based on the actions of a few soldiers is a little disingenuous and very straw man.
I think worrying about the impact in civilians who had no part in a crimes by their fellow countrymen but are being punished by the bluntness of a response is perfectly reasonable. In fact, I find the opposite (an utter lack of concern for it) to be unreasonable.
That’s true whether the blunt response is economic sanctions or widespread bombing.
Those actions might still be the best available response overall, but that conclusion should be reached after considering the effects on innocent civilians, not after ignoring them.
>while Russian soldiers are raping, murdering and looting left and right
It's disgusting that you translate blatant low-quality propaganda which clearly aims to amplify hatred. Even Zelensky had to fire Denisova who was behind the most outrageous lies about "raping". The Western media liked to re-translate her sexual fantasies, but have you heard any official refutations of those claims?
P.S.: I wonder why this comment was flagged. Is the Denisova's case became too toxic and ruins the demonization narrative?
There are numerous recorded cases of rape (according to various neutral NGOs present on the field), and there was that intercepted call of a Russian soldier getting permission from his wife to rape, as long as he used protection.
Saying the obvious fact Russian army rapes shouldn't amplify hatred, because the Russian army should already be hated and despised for it's brutality. To an extent it's not their direct fault because many of soldiers are just poor young guys acting on primal instincts with nobody to teach them better ( on the contrary, their war crimes are encouraged).
What evidence do you have to support your claim? Many countries have been subjected to sanctions for years, yet their military power hasn't diminished significantly (NK, Iran, ...).
The misery of the poor and disenfranchised, which you dismiss as people not "having anything anyways", has however been much exacerbated.
These actions only galvanize a country further to be even more dependent on manufacturing weapons to defend themselves, become more self-sufficient, and potentially seize nearby resources from adjacent countries. The people that do leave tend to be the wealthy aristocracy with the resources to leave for their own selfish reasons.
> You are punishing people for rolling poorly on the parental lottery.
If you accept this argument, you are letting the dictator hold his population hostage. Also the same argument applies to killing the invading soldiers.
Also it's not like Russian people are dying from hunger.
I think the point of the article is that sanctions as an instrument of attrition have the same problems as strategic bombing as an instrument of attrition: it works, but causes a lot of collateral damage that doesn't contribute much to attrition, so if you hope to achieve quick results by turning the enemy's civilians against their military, you'll be disappointed.
I wonder how much can we even talk about collateral damage when almost all the enemy civilians support an aggressive war. I get that they're non-combatants, but they're not innocents.
Especially when the "collateral damage" is in this case is "I can no longer buy iphone".
The more I get old, the more I notice that people’s opinions are not really their own, but are function of the nation’s medias. Can we blame people for their opinion?
Edit: with this I only meant to say that it is unfair to judge or blame - policies still need to be enforced which is in line with the established consensus of moral philosophy.
That’s a non-sequitur. If free will in the strict philosophical sense doesn’t exist (and I believe it might not), then we need to judge and blame to influence the decision process of current and potential offenders.
Germany paid the war damages of WWI (1914-1918!) until the 1990ies. War damages hugely aggravated the economic crisis of 1932, leading to you-know-what; I’ve always been surprised that we didn’t take this as a lesson that punishing children for the faults of their parents was a double-edged idea. Imagine being 17 in 1934, having to pay and apologize for a war you never did, let alone a war that you could never have influenced or lobbied against.
I’m still torn about this approach. But OTOH, peace must be enforced and warmonging nations must be weakened until the lesson is learnt. And we equate citizen with their nation’s decisions.
In tge case of strategic bombing it's easy: Targeting of non-combatants in war is a war crime. As colleteral damage it still sucks, but it is not a crime.
That's where the buck stops, because definibg what a non-combatant is is easier then deciding who is "innocent".
Sanctions are trickier, I just fail to come with an alternative to them.
Well, even if 100% of Russians, including the infants, supportrd the war it wouldn't change the fact that a potential strategic bombing campaign against Russian cities would be a war crime.
Civilians should not be dragged into it. Soldiers killing soldiers is one thing but civilians must not be dragged into it.
"but they're not innocents." ===> I'm wondering if those crazy bombers think the same as you do when killing/bombing "Civilians" instead or armed forces.
You logic was prevalent in feudal times. If someone attacked you, you'd wipe they whole city/area and their entire family tree just to make sure theree's nobody left to take revenge.
1. They're highly ineffective in that they've almost never led to regime change;
2. "Economic sanctions" is a euphemism. They are violence that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable. The article correct likens them to strategic bombing; and
3. They're a form of collective punishment. In many circumstances this constitutes a war crime.
Let me give you an example of (3). Imagine there are a spate of burglaries in your area. The police have good cause to believe the suspects are in your ZIP code. They decide to confiscate $100,000 collectively and spread evenly over each resident of that ZIP code. Why? Because this will motivate the residents to figure out who the burglar is and turn them in while making restitution to the victims.
> 1. They're highly ineffective in that they've almost never led to regime change;
The inability of the Soviet Regime to freely trade with the west greatly contributed to it's demise, so sanctions have been proven to contribute to regime change, for a counter example see China or Vietnam, they opened their markets and their Regimes are very much still in power. Additionally the aim of these sanctions is not regime change but hindering the Russian offensive.
> 2. "Economic sanctions" is a euphemism. They are violence that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable. The article correct likens them to strategic bombing;
I don't believe I have to say this, but dropping bombs on cities (strategic bombing) and refusing to buy natural gas (sanctions) is not the same thing.
> 3. They're a form of collective punishment. In many circumstances this constitutes a war crime.
That makes no sense. First of all most of the sanctions are not "punishment", they prohibit certain transactions and are not aimed at people. i.e. The EU decided to stop buying petroleum from Russia, that cannot be possibly construed as punishment. In the cases where the sanctions are actually "punishment" seizing of assets and such, it is very targeted to people and organizations with actual decision making power and influence in Russia or somehow connected with the regime or the Russian State (Oligarchs, banks, etc).
An example of how I view sanctions. Let's say Bob goes to a bank and takes a loan, then Bob proceeds to buy a gun with that loan and rob another bank, sanctions are equivalent to the bank refusing to loan more money to Bob until he stops robbing banks.
> The inability of the Soviet Regime to freely trade with the west greatly contributed to it's demise
Ah yes, the demise of the USSR is everyone's pet reason for [insert policy here], be it sanctions, military build-up (by Reagan predominantly), Afghanistan, economic factors and even cultural influence. Sanctions against the USSR lasted ~50 years and had limited effectiveness [1]
> When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a major debate broke out over the contribution that the campaign of economic sanctions had made toward the fall of the Soviet empire. Many former officials in the Reagan administration credited sanctions with a significant role in the disintegration of the Soviet economy and therefore of the Soviet Union itself. On the other hand, the leading work on the effectiveness of economic sanctions—Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered (vol. 1, p. 137)—concludes that although the United States did succeed in denying some arms and key technologies to the Soviets, the collapse stemmed from internal inefficiencies rather than U.S. economic sanctions.
> That makes no sense. First of all most of the sanctions are not "punishment".
Of course they're punishment. Or do you want to play semantics and argue it's mere "coercion"? Here's an exercise: set up a store selling whatever. I'll put a cordon around it and say no one can buy from you or sell to you because you don't pay your workers enough. Then tell me it's not "punishment".
> That makes no sense. First of all most of the sanctions are not "punishment", they prohibit certain transactions and are not aimed at people
Visa and MasterCard suddenly blocked all transactions for all credit/debit cards issued in Russia, and you claim such actions "not aimed at people"? Come on.
Economic sanction are just saying we are not playing with you (in the game called trade) if you can't behave.
You are not doing anything to anybody. You are just withdrawing your participation from mutually beneficial activity because of your principles. You always have right to do that.
1. It’s a bit of a straw man to claim that’s the only reason or measurement of success for sanctions.
2. The violence on the vulnerable is inflicted by the sanctioned regime, not the sanctioners. As another commenter noted, these regimes effectively hold their population hostage. They could feed their population, they just prefer to pour everything into the military.
3. In your example, are the residents following the orders of those burglars?
The answer depends on whether or not you are on the receiving end (perhaps as part of an unfortunate "collateral" line in someone's XLS spreadsheet).
The crime and punishment issues are mostly solved for individuals and small groups. There is a good reason why in most societies the victim is not the one who decides the fate of the attacker — it is the job of the law. Sadly, this doesn't work at international scale. That is when large scale punitive operations take place. And then the other side responds with more violence.
In the end of this feedback loop we reach the point where 99% of the ones who suffer are collateral damage — from all sides. Is it inevitable? It seems so. No matter what happens next, someone has to pay, right?
