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Comment by surfer7837 | Hacker News Reader

That's the point. It's so they can pressure their government

I was on the receiving end of sanctions in Serbia during 90-ties. That felt very, very unfair, since they also affect people like me who were against government.

They're also countereffective, since dictatorship uses it to push story that "they are against out people, we all suffer but if we stand together (under our rule) we'll prevail". And from what I saw at that time, people redirected their hate from government to evil foreign enemies. This seems to be the pattern in other countries where sanctions are pushed. They really make life worse for ordinary people, not those in power, who even use it for their own benefit.

Let dictators push whatever story they want. Serbia was a belligerent pariah and suffered economically for it. When the dictator was ousted it stopped being a belligerent pariah and benefited economically from that. That's all that matters in the long run.

It's not like that, sanctions make it harder to overthrow a dictatorship.

On one hand, 90% of people can only hear official media. With sanctions, they have much easier job telling that someone else is to blame.

On the other hand it makes much much harder for political opposition to fight that narrative, to propose opening the country towards West when they're clearly acting against population through these sanctions.

That's why these sanctions benefit regime, and that's why they're double evil - hurt people + make it harder for opposition to fight the dictator.

In Serbia's case, sanctions didn't help at all with overthrowing Milosevic. They just brought misery to ordinary people and he remained in charge through the 90-ties.

It took loosing all the wars, getting country bombarded by NATO and de facto loosing control over Kosovo, getting entire opposition united, and massive protests to remove him from the power.

i agree the us policy in the balkans is an overwhelming success. bosnia and herzegovina prospers and is more stable than ever [1]. kosovo and serbia are best of friends [2]. there is almost zero corruption and gdp is through the roof [3]. there are no children being born with defects and there has been zero cancer cases due to nato dropping depleted uranium [4]. as far as former yugoslavia is concerned, only slovenia is dirt poor

[1] https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/bosnias-next-crisis/

[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/serbia-kosovo-dialogue-dead-selakovi...

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

[4] https://europeanwesternbalkans.com/2019/12/26/depleted-urani...

[5] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/groups/Former-Yugo...

Sure. Bunch of angry devs will pressure a lifelong dictator lol People living in a fairy land. What will happen is that ordinary people will suffer the most and loose whatever decoupling to government they have, and government will have the same power over people or even greater under pretense that they now have to do bunch of random horrendous things to fight evil foreign powers. And I speak from first hand experience. Yugoslavia in the 90ties.

"Terrorism, regime destabilization, and policy change related objectives are by far more often assessed as failed, as compared to the other policy objectives. Overall, the average success rate [of sanctions] of around 34% across different policy objectives is very much in line with the effectiveness rate of 34% that is reported in the analysis of Hufbauer et al. (2007) and falls in the middle of the success rates ranging between 27% and 37% form Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions (TIES) database of Morgan et al. (2014)."

The paper also notes that "the success rate of sanctions has gone up until 1995 and fallen since then."

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~cas86/GSDB_FKSYY.pdf

20-35% success rate of sanctions has been replicated a bunch of times. Sanctions are the foreign policy experts form of collective punishment. It seems they largely exist to satisfy the bureaucrat's need to "do something."

People who don't have to worry about feeding and sheltering their families are in a much better position to pressure their totalitarian governments.

That sounds suspiciously like Western logic.

If a random individual attempts to "pressure" an autocratic government, they will land in prison or fall out of their window.

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