The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War
history.columbia.edu
history.columbia.edu
From a schoolyard perspective, economic sanctions are like giving a peer the silent treatment. It hurts you both, but it's your right not to interact with someone if you find them sufficiently unpleasant. War is like committing homicide against that peer during recess. In other words, it's really fucking bad.
I agree it’s certainly not the same as direct warfare, but its definitely somewhere in the middle, and can particularly castostrophic when done in a concerted multilateral fashion (ie. North Korea).
War is shooting people dead.
There is a stark difference.
At any rate, sanctions create consequences for trade for third parties as well, so any country that doesn't come along on it will also face the possibility of being shut off from trade with the EU, the US, and the rest of their allied nations. No country in the world save China can endure that for long without completely destabilizing their economy and their legal order.
And make no mistake, people will die due to these sanctions. Russia's medical system will not endure lack of trade for long, and it's likely there will be food shortages as well. This is entirely independent of whether or not it's the right thing to do. People need to understand that these actions have real human consequences, whether they agree with the cost or not.
Sanctions as enacted here are not "I'm not talking to you", they're "I will punch anyone who keeps talking to you."
Also, I guarantee you that if a country sanctioned the US in a way that actually impacted the american economy (again, probably only China could pull this off right now), the US would consider it an act of aggression. Just nationalizing American interests has been cause for American intervention before.
Hardly. We are’t going to bomb a country that goes against the sanctions. They will just also be sanctioned.
We are forcing people to pick a side to do business with, not punching them.
Yes, and because most countries in the world are smaller than the US or Russia, they will suffer because of it. Likely with people dying, either directly or indirectly. The smaller the country, the more sanctions hurt, the more it's like getting punched in the face.
Most countries in the world can't afford to be excluded from trade with the western bloc.
In the US' case, sanctions often also come with things like "withholding the target country's reserves held with the US central bank", which do material harm to the target country's economy.
People keep trying to frame this as "just not buying gas/oil" but the funniest thing about that is that for the most part, the sanctioning countries are still buying gas from russia. That is literally the one thing not included in these sanctions. The sanctions would probably work better if they did stop buying natural resources, but the backsplash from doing that would be immense.
Anyways, it's awfully convenient that the tools America is uniquely positioned to use to cause harm to other countries (economic sanctions, targeted drone strikes, etc) are never "cause for war."
And again, this is completely independent of whether or not it's the right thing to do. If you can't get over your cognitive dissonance long enough to recognize that sometimes the right thing to do can cause immense harm, I don't know what to tell you. You should still recognize that sanctions are not neutral acts, and they do kill people as surely as a gun does. Thinking otherwise means you're somehow still stuck in the 19th century's idea of war (and even they would probably consider a trade blockade an act of war).
Economic sanctions are the rich countries way of being a bully. We are all interconnected and cutting one country's access and resources is worse than attacking them.
Topically, it means not rolling tanks into another country and killing their people. Not sure why this is difficult to understand. Russia isn't reacting to sanctions. Sanctions are a reaction to war.
Russia isn’t tiny resource poor Cuba. Everyone who refuses to trade with Russia suffers real losses as they are forced to get key goods from other sources. For central and Eastern European counties this is a real issue.
Imagine the US sanctioning Mexico… yes, it would hurt Mexico’s economy, but it would also devastate the economy of the South West USA.
Economic sanctions is the rich nations' weapon. It's a weapon that only a wealthy nation can wield. It's why there is so much support for it amongst rich nations. Certainly if anyone destabilized the american or european economies with sanctions, we'd definitely call it an act of war.
> From a schoolyard perspective, economic sanctions are like giving a peer the silent treatment.
No. It would be like Bezos saying if anyone does business with you, they'll be cut off from amazon. It's saying anyone who does business with russia is going to get attacked. It's why china was attacked for trading with iran when china doesn't have any economic sanctions on iran. It's saying the whole world can't do business with russia.
All wars are fundamentally economic wars. But we usually cloak it around noble virtues like 'freedom, god, democracy, 'kill nazis', etc' because it's so tacky and shameful to be attacking each other for money. Makes you no better than common criminal. A lousy thief at that. Surely, the leaders of Russia, US, NATO, etc are better than some lousy neighborhood thief. Right?
This 100%. I'm seriously wondering how all these people supporting heavy sanctions will feel when Putin realizes he can't win via conventional means and his economy is destroyed, so he starts nuking things.
It's a country similarly corrupt as Russia (oligarch wise), that's used as a puppet to pressure it. They have big foreign involvement, and even had their democratically elected leader toppled just 8 years ago. Nominal democracy and huge foreign influence are not contradictory, rather they are the norm.
Don't use them as pawns against Russia, don't get them into NATO, and have Russia sign and respect that - and ensure their borders from Russia and everybody else, fighting for them if necessary (not merely with hypocritical sanctions and condemnations after you've sacrificed them).
Or, nuke Russia, and get nuked.
Our options are very limited and these alternatives are all terrible.
What happens if you give in to a dictator’s demands isn’t that he is satisfied and stops. Instead he will realize that he got away with it, then try something bigger next time. There are countless examples of this in history.
Anyway, I get the argument that you should stand up to the bully, but this guy gives me the vibe that he's actually all-in and will (literally) lose his head if he loses this war. I think if this continues and he gets into a losing spot, he will gamble that his nuclear forces will win. I don't see any other option for him actually.
Calling sanctions war is like calling boycotts theft. Vegetarians are not stealing money from beef producers.
What boycotts and sanctions can be is passive aggressiveness. It harms people on a social level, and since humans are social creatures, it feel like violence. The problem of comparing violence with social violence is that not being invited to a party hurt, but it hurts in a different way from getting knifed. Our brain interpret social pain as physical phantom pain, but we must be able to distinguish between real and non-real pain. Society depend on it.
The reason blocking a port is a act of war is that the nation blocking that port is also blocking it for other nations who might be willing to trade. That is like a vegetarian going out during the night and killing off the beef productions herd of cows.
Same occurs with nations. Small nations joins together to form large collection of nations, voting democratically on rules and decisions. EU is an union of European countries. If a country want to be in EU they will have to follow the decisions on the democratic process. We can eval this further and say that independent individuals can choose to form nations, and those independent nations can choose to form unions, and those unions can form global trade agreements, each however limited to the democratic process which dictate conditions, rules and laws.
Individuals can also choose to leave their countries, countries can leave unions, and unions can leave the global trade agreements. It is a choice. They do however loose the ability to achieve those things that is only possible when people work together.
But it does require attacking or destroying. We aren’t engaging Russia at all. This is like calling a boycott theft.
> It's saying anyone who does business with russia is going to get attacked. It's why china was attacked for trading with iran when china doesn't have any economic sanctions on iran. It's saying the whole world can't do business with russia.
Sanctions are telling people that they must pick a side. We will not be friends with X and if you are friends with them, we will not be friends with you. China was not attacked. It was just told that it can be only with one group.
The EU wants to dominate the cultural and political landscape in Eastern Europe. The West have their ideals of human rights, democracy, climate change, migration, etc. Russia has different views. Even if Ukraine were to become a part of the EU and NATO, all that happens is the problem is postponed. At some point the West will impose sanctions on Russia anyway, regardless of an invasion, because Russia is an obstacle to Globalization. I think that Putin saw the writing on the wall and that's why he made a move.
I certainly don't agree with it, I don't agree with the war, but what did the EU think was going to happen? They and the US smugly admitted to tampering with the internal affairs Ukraine over the last several decades, and and have made their designs on Eastern Europe obvious. Now that they are implementing extreme sanctions on the Russian people, it is only confirmation bias for the Russians and more reason for them to double down on the direction they are headed in.
Yet Russia hasn't just been self isolating. It has demonstrated a thirst for influence outside its borders. And has been behaving much like the USSR before it, just with less success and the appearance of some democratic process like elections.
EU and NATO countries are trying to strike a different balance between nation sovereignty and economic power.
At one point Putin apparently wanted to join NATO. Though I doubt because of shared values or mutual defense against aggression.
I simply don't understand the moral argument for why people and countries are required to engage in trades that produce economic surplus if they dislike the person or country with whom they are trading.
You aren’t wrong but you also have to consider that economic sanctions have historically been a precursor if not the friction point that caused a war.
Analogies of sanctions being like giving the school yard bully the cold shoulder seem like just such a naive interpretation given how they have played out historically.
I’m not saying they can’t work or that they shouldn’t be used just to be aware of the full range of possible outcomes.
When a government has a proven record of bullying or annexing their neighbors I think boycotting is the least one can do. And collective sanctions among allies is a reasonable next step where diplomacy fails.
In the case of Russia sanctions weren't even enough to stop them after they annexed Crimea. No one wants to continuously cave into a bully then pretend it's "peace in our time".
Well, some sanctions had more casualties than some wars.
War usually involves another country directly causing harm and suffering to an aggressor. To escape the aggressor often must capitulate completely.
They starve and kill the poorest in a nation. It's akin to carpet bombing a town without explosions.
This is not hyperbole. Look to history at the destruction of sanctions.
Just like the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, those who speak against the destruction will be derided as unpatriotic, freedom hating traitors.
We don't have to see the mass destruction and pain they cause, because it's not a direct explosion like a bomb, but the ultimate effect is much the same like you say.
Your point is taken, it’s not physically blowing someone up. But from the global perspective, isolating Russia with sanctions removes them from the economy in the same way bombing Moscow would, while leaving alive people who might have a chance of changing the course of the conflict.
You don’t have to kill an enemy to neutralize it. In fact it’s quicker, easier, cheaper, and more effective not to. But it is still every bit an act of war — wrecking the global economy is also “really fucking bad.”
And besides all that, if people getting blown up is what you’re looking for, it’s still early days yet. This is all far from over. And even if it stopped tomorrow, we will be dealing with the ramifications of this for years.
It's not just a matter of abstaining from trading with them, the US and Europe are blockading trade by third parties as well. Even the bank of China has suspended dealings with some Russian banks because doing so would incur legal penalties on them from the US. Even parts manufactured in third party countries that were made using US equipment or technology are barred from export to Russia no matter who makes them or where.
The US and Europe are construing a technical argument that, well, these are US technologies, and it's ok to block trading with them in Dollars because the US technically owns all dollars, but the effect is to coerce many third parties into unwillingly participating in the blockade. Technically no it's not really an act of war. In practice it's absolutely a direct attack on the Russian economy and if not an act of war definitely an act of explicit aggression.
I say this as someone who fully and wholeheartedly supports these sanctions and believes they are well deserved. They are the right thing to do. I wish we were doing a lot, lot more and as soon as we can stop buying their oil and gas too the better.
There's a review with the same title as this post here: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2021-1...
Which sums up the topic with:
> In an original and persuasive analysis, Mulder shows how isolating aggressors from global commerce and finance was seen as an alternative to war that worked precisely because of the pain it imposed on the target society. From the very beginning, it was civilians who suffered the most. Nevertheless, the League of Nations embraced sanctions and established an elaborate legal and bureaucratic apparatus to enforce them. Mulder argues that instead of keeping the peace, this form of economic warfare aggravated the tensions of the 1930s, encouraging austerity and autarky and restraining smaller states but backfiring against the larger authoritarian ones, such as Italy.
I think this is an interesting point to bring up, because, especially in the West, we hold a believe that "economic" violence is not as bad as "physical" violence. It's well worth at least questioning this assumption.
The actual economic effect may usually be countered but the humiliation remains.
So it may be efficient in scaring small, dependent nations but it won't lead to victories against large and proud ones.
And I mean the latter more in the criminal sentiment of "it's all about respect".
Famine among millions of people, and general economic depression has a massive human toll. But it doesn't compare to full on nuclear war, followed by nuclear winter and Global radiation levels from fallout.
So it seems obvious to me that economic violence is the only for of violence the west can bring to bear against Russia. There is a discussion to be had on the matter of whether it should be brought to bear. Punishing the people for the actions of the elite and all that. Perhaps also a 'what does this system lead to in peace time' question, but that seems to argue 'economic sanctions are a tragedy of the commons', which means it is hard to address. At least the solution 'we just won't sanction' does not actually resolve the tragedy of the commons.
It seems like "dude has nukes and feels backed into a wall" is just really shite. You either give him what he wants, or you risk nuclear war.
If people start starving en masse the way they did back during Soviet Collectivization, which saw 4-7M dead[0], what's stopping Putin from ending it all in retaliation?
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet...
No one is going to listen now.
Not to mention the die has been cast already.
https://history.columbia.edu/events/the-economic-weapon-the-...
(Event announcements like this aren't on topic for HN because they aren't intrinsically interesting. An article or transcript or recording of the event might well be.)
We are living in crazy times, but as the Ukrainian ambassador said, there's no purgatory for these people, they go straight to hell.
Removing the tools of trade to specifically punish a country is akin to war, I agree with the sentiment. A lot of innocent people are going to starve and die because of this decision, regardless of whether or not bombs are dropped. They don't have any other options and their already fragile and corrupt markets are crashing.
TLDR; Russians are about to face mass shortages of basic goods at the same time their markets are crashing. This is going to cause major problems when people try to buy things like food and seed to grow more food. There's already a brain drain hitting Russia as these sanctions take effect, so the government may be forced to close the borders as well.
0: https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/03/04/world-war-of-economic-...
Russia is interesting though, because with so much land, arguably they can be self sufficient, which means only intelligence & innovation holds them back if they want to turn inwards like China did, which the Brits exploited commercially through Hong Kong.
Russia have already demonstrated intelligence and innovation during the cold war with sputnik, they also have tried and tested rocket technology which will boost the French Ariana rockets but we know that genius individuals are distributed around the planet although the health of the mother, diet during pregnancy & during the first 8years will go along way to helping a genius. But the West has pollution which is lowering IQ levels, just like Covid is lowering IQ levels as seen with the "brain fog", so I wouldnt write them off if they followed the science and wanted to go isolationist. Even North Korea has shown it can still survive albeit at a slower pace to the rest of the world, but nothing like the Nazi war effort, which goes to show how idea's can motivate groups of people.