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Comment by pizza | Hacker News Reader

Effects of sanctions totally slide off the elite and shit all over the poorest members of a society.

And war doesn't?

War has often resulted in regime change or occupation, sometime even execution of defeated leadership, so no; war often affects the elite (in the end).

Short of receiving an act of aggression challenging the sovereign of your nation, sanctions are always preferable to war. Resource starvation occurs during wartime, but, in contrast to war, sanctions mean no lives are being lost and no property is being destroyed because of physical violence. The people of a nation are still put in a corner, but they don't have a gun to their head. It's something they can get out if, should they choose to.

Also, pizza's comment is naive and misinformed. Broad sanctions on entire industries can affect the poor, yes. It also affects the people in the middle and also the people near the top! You can't fly in a private jet if 1) you can't buy one and 2) can't get fuel for the jet. Furthermore, sanctions have explicitly been used to target the wealthy and not the poor. See:

https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/s...

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/06/politics/russia-sanctions-oli...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-24/trump-say...

pizza says his one of his interests is "realistic alternatives/complements to pure capitalism," which already demonstrates a misinformed notion of the world: he assumes pure capitalism exists in ANY form. It doesn't. The US is perhaps the most capitalistic society, but Social Security is quite clearly a socialist program in nature. I like Social Security and think it's highly useful, by the way (notwithstanding the storm of the decline of program revenue and increase in program participants).

I think it's important to distinguish between conditions which are unfortunate and conditions which are unbearable. Sanctions commonly make conditions unbearable for the poor; when food becomes scarce, the poor starve first; when energy prices increase, the poor are the first to be without energy. While the rich suffer too, they tend to retain their relative place in society, and their dignity. Being without a private jet is unfortunate but not unbearable.

> The people of a nation are still put in a corner, but they don't have a gun to their head. It's something they can get out if, should they choose to.

This really trivialises the challenges and discrimination economic refugees face, especially those from sanctioned countries.

The consequences of warfare have a much greater potential to make life unbearable for those in power. Being captured, executed or otherwise killed is a likely eventuality.

>I think it's important to distinguish between conditions which are unfortunate and conditions which are unbearable.

Ok. Some conditions created by sanctions are unbearable, and some conditions created by sanctions are unfortunate. In war, all conditions are unbearable. War is objectively worse.

>> The people of a nation are still put in a corner, but they don't have a gun to their head. It's something they can get out if, should they choose to.

>This really trivialises the challenges and discrimination economic refugees face, especially those from sanctioned countries.

It is not my intention to trivialize their situation, though perhaps that sense is lacking from my comment. What I mean is that sanctioning a nation does not mean the citizenry is forced to stand on a battlefield and die. When I say, "should they choose to," I'm referring to either seeking refuge or revolution. Both are immensely difficult tasks, but both are a choice.

One of the (stated) uses for sanctions is encouraging regime change. The US tried and failed over the last 60 years to create democratic nations by taking out the leadership of regimes. My understanding of the reason that policy failed so many times is because the people themselves didn't fight for it. The people are so controlled and government so corrupt, they have no easy way to.

Do I like sanctions? Of course not! They obviously create incredible difficulties for everyone in that country. But I'd rather suffer through hardship than die fighting for an unjust cause.

>The consequences of warfare have a much greater potential to make life unbearable for those in power. Being captured, executed or otherwise killed is a likely eventuality.

pizza used the phrase "elite," and you use the phrase "in power." If you're a political figure, you're both "elite" and "in power." The political figure (as well as any subordinate) holds the moral responsibility of waging war. They tacitly accept the risks of conviction and/or execution; incompetence is no excuse. So, yes, you're right, but war would create an even worse environment for the poor than sanctions do. I'd wager that every country in the world has special rules that come into effect when in a state of war. Those rules usually include tough rations, in order to supply the military. If the fighting is happening in that country, it would get worse once the country's means of agricultural production are wiped out.

There have been a growing trend of personal sanctions targeting power actors and their affiliates. Most of them in form of Magnitsky laws, championed by Bill Browder. They hurt enough that Putin had to bring up punishing Browder at Helsinki summit with Trump.

Yep, Bill Browder is basically the most effective person to ever lobby multiple world powers into creating legislation to blacklist people by name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act#Individuals_affe...) from Russia or any country for that matter. TLDR; is that Browder was making some sweet money in Russia after the USSR collapsed and eventually enough powerful people in Russia didn't want him there, so he had to leave, but one of his lawyers was arrested and mysteriously died in prison.

There is a great podcast floating out there from NPR where they talk about the seemingly real possibility that Russia had a vested interest in getting a president in office just to repeal the Magnitsky Act because it hurt that much.

Worth noting though that the majority of powerful people in Russia have primary assets, investments, family and property in the West. This makes the legislation very effective. It is hard to tell how much that would apply to Iran's mullahs.

The western banking system is much more porous than one would think. Sanctions against individuals could be a very fine grained stopgap solution.

The below is mostly writing off the recent shock of having been centimeters away from buying real estate off one of the most important known straw men laundering shady Russian and other former USSR money. I discovered his identity just in time...

A lot of this shady money was laundered through Baltic banks. Just one straw man, Staņislavs Gorins (Stanislav Gorin), was a director in name in many hundreds of companies in Latvia and offshore that laundered enormous amounts and moved it west.

He claims his identity was stolen, but that's very unlikely, given actions like him personally going to foreign embassies to help setup foreign shell companies. And given he's actively scheming with OneCoin, a shady Bulgarian crypto coin.

I went looking down the rabbit hole a bit further. It looks like Latvia has somewhat learned its lesson, but especially in the UK, relevant legislation is like Swiss cheese: one giant loophole. Just search for "companies house loopholes".

yep, let them build nuclear weapons and have their way in Syria.

It is sad the sanctions have that side effect. Hopefully it’s enough to affect some change in a hostile country led by an oppressive elite.

Like America?

Exactly like America

At this point can it really be considered a side effect. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that that is what the result will be and yet people still insist on them.

As the comment above you alluded to, and as it's been evidenced many times, it is not enough to affect change. These aren't "side effects", the poorest feel the main effect of the sanctions.

They're side effects, but not entirely unintended.

If the head of that state (and party elites etc) don't meet the requests of the sanctioning states, the ensuing poverty can mobilize the impoverished masses. This can backfire and drive them to further nationalism/jingoism, but it opens a window of opportunity for the opposition (and, more cynically, covert agents and external forces).

Sanctions (in the form that the US is applying them to Venezuela and Iran) are a form of economic warfare. The idea is to cause economic instability by stopping (oil) exports, and thus cause general instability. Now, there are mismanagement arguments you could make but it would be naive to ignore the massive effects that US (and importantly, US ally) sanctions have on a country that relies on exports.

The effects on Iran are not side-effects. They are clearly the primary goal.

The sanctions hurt from the bottom up. The elites who own the economy lose some money but they are eatill comfort.

The elites in countries like Iran and Venezuela derive all of their wealth by theft from the bottom 99%, without exception.

Just take a look at the extraordinary pile of wealth and power the fake theocracy in Iran has thefted away via Setad (about $100 billion stolen from the Iranian people). Reuters has done great investigative reporting on this over the years:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1

It turns out Khamenei is nothing more than a Putin-like kleptocrat, a thief, using religion as a cover for building a massive corporate empire on the backs of the poor Iranian people (from which he aggressively steals property). Everything about modern Iran makes sense once you read about Khamenei and Setad.

The people in the bottom 99% are the only ones who can change these countries. If you could take most of the personal wealth of the members of eg the Maduro regime in Venezuela, it would change absolutely nothing. They ultimately rule by gun, through military control. The majority - including large sections of the military - has to turn against the leadership to spur change.

Countries have no moral obligation to support the Maduro or Khamenei regimes (which is what happens when you freely trade with them and prop them up through hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign investment and oil purchases). Someone will reply to this and say: well the US is exactly the same as Maduro and Khamenei (or worse). The only proper response to that is: ok, sure, boycott or embargo the US, give it your best shot.

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