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Five years seems pretty mild when you consider the chief purpose of sanctions is to provide an alternative to war as a means of settling disputes. And this man is willfully undermining the ability of his country to levy sanctions.

Surely actively undermining the security of ones country is a serious offense.

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> as a means of settling disputes

As a means of forcing someone to unwillingly settle a dispute in your favor that is.

I have no sympathy for North Korea, but sanctions are not an alternative to war. Sanctions are an alternative to bullets.

> As a means of forcing someone to unwillingly settle a dispute in your favor that is.

what kind of strange take it is? What do you think war is ?

Someone recently explained their view, that sanctions are akin to siege warfare in days of old. Whether you agree with that analogy or not, there is an underlying valid point that not all warfare requires physical violence. We use the term cyber warfare as another example.

> there is an underlying valid point that not all warfare requires physical violence.

All warfare requires physical violence. If it's not physically violent, “warfare” is being used as a loose metaphor, not a factual description.

> We use the term cyber warfare as another example.

Cyberwarfare not directed at or effectuating physical destruction of materiel and/or persons is merely metaphorical rather than actual warfare, or is part of the information component of a broader war. (OTOH, cyberwarfare can be, in fact, a direct means of achieving physical destruction of materiel and/or persons.)

No, sorry. It doesn’t. You can destroy bridges. No violence there. Yet now you can’t feed the troops.

That is still a form of warfare.

Is destruction of property still violence?

Sanctions aren’t hindering anyones property, it’s just refusing to do business with your hated enemy.

Cyber-warfare is in most instances comparable to sabotage as used in warfare.

I can see the point you're making about sanctions being similar to siege warfare. The main difference being that sieges separate you from your own forces and allies in a way that sanctions don't.

They are more like blockades, they just use diplomacy and legal systems instead of parking ships with big guns outside the harbor.

And I suppose the difference between a siege and a blockade is pretty much whether or not you fire those big guns into the city.

I mean, they're really more like trade embargoes, which have existed for hundreds of years. Thomas Jefferson reacted to the Chesapeake affair, for example, by cutting off all international US trade. In retrospect, probably a pretty ineffective foreign policy choice, since it tanked the US economy and didn't particularly hurt the Brits, who were happy that France could no longer trade with the US. (This occurred during the background of the Napoleonic wars and the Royal Navy impressing US sailors).

Yes, but when people say war in isolation, the vast majority of the population take that that, rightfully so, to refer to the conventional bullets flying tanks rolling, literally death dealing war.

Axlees post above reads in amazingly bad faith. It's just a "oh, you're not using this nonstandard definition you fool" type sarcastic response to dismiss the point, contributing nothing in itself.

Yes, but when people say war in isolation, the vast majority of the population take that that, rightfully so, to refer to the conventional bullets flying tanks rolling, literally death dealing war.

They can be analogous to war, but the whole response about"oh no, what sanctions are also war" is just playing rhetorical games.

When people say war, the vast majority of the population will take it to mean boots on the ground, military involved, bullets flying war. The sarcastic

That’s what he’s saying. Sanctions are war without bullets.

War is diplomacy with bullets.

Sanctions are economic warfare.

By that standard, all international intercourse is one or another form of warfare.

When intended to harm one party, yes. When the US technically and financially supported the groups that caused the illegal removal of the previous elected Brazilian president, it was warfare.

When Putin financially supports the French far-right, it’s also warfare.

Sabotaging your own military's weapons still sounds an awful lot like treason

I think we'd have to be in an actual formally declared war with someone first.

This is accurate for a technical definition of treason in the US.

Sanctions have never ever in human history worked, so more like sabotaging one's placebos...

The sanctions imposed on South Africa in the 1980s absolutely crippled the country and are widely seen as a successful contribution in the efforts of bringing down Apartheid.

> The sanctions imposed on South Africa in the 1980s absolutely crippled the country and are widely seen as a successful contribution in the efforts of bringing down Apartheid.

They played a role, but Western institutions are biased to exaggerate it and gloss over the fact that the sanctions regimes were only adopted after the reinvigoration of the armed struggle fueled by stepped up material and training support from the USSR brought into serious doubt the survival of the South African regime even with continued active support.

The West didn't want South Africa to lose, and wouldn't concede to it losing until the alternative was it losing anyway and armed struggle and support of the Communist bloc being the entire narrative for why, which they didn't like for either international or domestic political optics.

Sanctions have absolutely wrecked many hostile countries aconomy, crippling their ability to conduct war. There's a reason why North Korea's army is 50s technology held together by duct tape.

Unfortunately, it creates a lot of collateral damage.

It at least worked so far in preventing another Korean war. It didn't topple the Kim regime, but South Korea is mostly safe now.

> It at least worked so far in preventing another Korean war.

It would have to work at coercing a final end to the 1950- Korean War before it could have a chance to succeed or fail at preventing another one.

> In regards to the effectiveness of the sanctions, supporters concede that multilateral sanctions have been found to work 33% of the time.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20034049

Does that matter? If someone tried to sell state secrets to another country and their buyer turned out to be a CIA agent undercover and the secrets were fake info planted for them to sell, they still likely will be prosecuted for treason despite all that.

Unless they faked the information themselves and, instead of conning the Russian government they conned the CIA.

Do you have any sources for this?

Fidel Castro, Kim jong Il, and Vladimir Putin.

Those are the only three instances where sanctions were used "ever in human history"?

Most recent attempts thus most applicable to today’s world. Yes.

The sanctions of the last 8 years have probably played a significant role in diminishing the RF's capacity to effectively occupy Ukraine.

OTOH, Russia successfully elected a POTUS that helped cripple Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

A simple google search shows lots of examples, even recent ones, where sanctions clearly worked.

They're doing great at diminishing NK's industrial capacity, which it is hell-bent on using it to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Having nuclear weapons is the only sure way to prevent someone from “liberating” you through an invasion.

How are bullets and war different?

Sanctions are war.

This is a dumb statement every time it's asserted. Sanctions are not an act of war in any sense. Not in theory nor in a pragmatic sense. The distinction between war and other modes of interstate hostility is an important one which we should not abandon. "Sanctions are war" is the same sort of statement as "speech is violence": it's sophistic, and it collapses nuance instead of encouraging it.

It really depends on the particularities of the sanctions, the target of the sanctions, the degree of willingness of other states in the sanctioning process, and how the sanctions are enforced. A blockade that leads to starvation and enforced by the threat of overwhelming force against blockade runners is -- and always has been -- an act of war.

None of that nuance is necessary in this case. To be clear, kids: helping a despotic regime with ICBM ambitions evade currency controls so its ruling class can enjoy luxury and fund WMD weapons programs while its citizens literally starve is A Bad Thing.

Politics is just a continuation of war by other means. :)

"Go beat/kill this guy" is violence, yet it's just words. Putin haven't killed people with his bare hands(at least for a few years...)But who wouldn't call him violent?

If your sanctions cause people to die, of hunger, sickness or anything else, it's violence.

I'm not against sanctions depending on the circumstances, but you're just wrong

1. "Go beat/kill this guy" is specific targeted incitement.

2. Sanctions are not the same as a blockade. What you're describing is a blockade. To be more specific, suspending trade is not the same an active blockade. I haven't seen any indication to see the current sanctions could even function as a blockade.

Just a note on 1. It’s not incitement when it’s orders. Putin is in a position to give the orders.

> cause people to die, of hunger, sickness or anything else, it's violence

Which would imply famine, poverty, the flu are forms of violence.

This distortion of the English language is so tortured it's just nonsensical at this point.

When one nation causes another to suffer famine, poverty, and a devastating epidemic, that should pretty much qualify as a form of war.

Sanctions are saying “we will not trade with you”. Refusing to trade is violence?

Is it violence if you walk past a homeless guy who is hungry and you don’t give him food?

if you imprison every person who gives or sell food to him then it's violence

If people don't follow Putin's orders, they get imprisoned or executed. His orders are not "just words".

The same as the guy in the article was imprisoned by the United States?

EDIT: Putin puts people in jail for not following marching orders. The U.S. puts people in jail for not following sanctions. It doesn't seem logical to draw a distinction on what is or is not warlike (bullets vs sanctions) based on who jails people, since they both jail people who disobey orders. I assume other factors would be more relevant?

Well only because people follow his orders to imprison those who aren’t following his orders.

You can't force someone to trade with you - while being able to trade within your state is a right, international trade is a privilege. This privilege is negotiated at the state level. If you decide to thumb your nose at your trading partners they can stop trading with you, because they don't owe you trade.

If you built an economy entirely dependent on foreign trade for the survival of your own citizens it's best not to bite the hand that feeds, eh? But making sure your citizens survive is your responsibility and yours alone - not that of your trading partners.

Is this the vibe you are going with?

https://original.antiwar.com/daniel_larison/2021/05/03/sanct...

Edit: more sauce: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/what-are-sanctions-ra...

Is also a Putin line, so take as you will.

More sauce: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/what-are-sanctions-ra...

It’s war, without bullets.

Sometimes bullets are amongst the items sanctioned, so not necessarily

"Sanctions are Economic Weapons of Mass Destruction, We Must Carefully Consider their Consequences": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFCpMOCVdAw

> Sanctions are an alternative to bullets.

I'm going to have to disagree there. Sanctions once enacted are definitely an alternative to war, after all, bullets all by themselves don't constitute an act but sanctions are an act.

War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.

While often treated as a conclusion, its worth noting that that's the antithesis in a thesis/antithesis/synthesis triad.

Sanctions aren't an alternative to war. We like to imagine dropping bombs on someone is less polite than starving them to death, but it's just an illusion.

> Surely actively undermining the security of ones country is a serious offense.

The information he shared in North Korea is widely available online. Perhaps unethical but I wouldn't qualify it as a serious offense.

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