Sanctions and Strategic Bombing
scholars-stage.org
scholars-stage.org
> "We imagine that the pain these civilians experience will translate into political change—either a change in regime, or a change in regime behavior."
The aim of the sanctions is not regime change, but the degradation of the Russian military's ability to wage war.
I think the author is observing the current sanctions in the same lens as the sanctions imposed after the occupation of Crimea, where there was a very hand wavy reasoning about integrated deterrence and how the pain of sanctions would make Russia pull out or at least not go forward with further aggression.
In my mind there is a very clear distinction in the aim of sanctions before and after beginning of the current Russian offensive, as I said before the aim now is clearly to hinder the offensive, before it was deterrence. I don't believe these particular sanctions are aimed at regime change.
Furthermore, as has been noted in the comment section of the article, while the strategic bombing -> low morale/regime change reasoning has been shown false, I think there is a still a lot of room to investigate how much the strategic bombings affected the targets ability to deploy it's forces. It's clear that to achieve victory in the context of the second world war there had to be boots on the ground, but that doesn't mean that the strategic bombing did not contribute.
Similarly because sanctions are not enough to achieve the argued final goal (regime change) that doesn't mean they don't have an effect.
This is addressed directly in the article:
> There are many plausible reasons one might inflict economic harm on an opposing country: [...]. Or they might be kept in place to degrade the Russian economy over the long term, thus frustrating Russian attempts to modernize their military in the decades to come. [...] It is not clear to me which, if any, of these rationales motivate our current sanctions regime.
You write:
> I think there is a still a lot of room to investigate how much the strategic bombings affected the targets ability to deploy it's forces
and the article places some breadcrumbs about that too:
> the collapse imagined by the early air theorists of the ‘30s was possible if the indiscriminate carpet bombing of World War II were replaced by surgical, precision strikes on enemy
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.
Broad sanctions are just bad policy.
Where do you think the Russians get food from?
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.
Russia is below 2% of Chinese trade and decreasing. Netherlands, 10 million people country matters more for Chinese trade than Russia.
China only wants Russia to sold cheap raw resources, and will squeeze them until they fold like Iran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93China_25-year_Coo...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
Those who can move -- move out of the country (usually the most economically active people), weakening the regime ability to make weapons.
Those who starve have nothing to lose, so they start fighting the regime. Revolutions never happen in well fed society.
The misery of the poor and disenfranchised, which you dismiss as people not "having anything anyways", has however been much exacerbated.
Iran too - they've been focused on reverse engineering cold war tech, which they did with mixed results.
contradicts
> potentially seize nearby resources from adjacent countries.
What? My understanding was that the revolution in Iran happened during a period of relative economic prosperity.
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.
Especially when the "collateral damage" is in this case is "I can no longer buy iphone".
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.
Can we blame the mentally underdeveloped, like children?
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.
My counter-point is that almost everyone from my friends, family and colleagues are upset about the war, and many left the country
"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.
Considering the cost of the bomb, I think the expected value is rather likely to be negative.
I think sanctions should be applied based on answers to these questions, not some vague idea that they'll be like a debuff in a video game.
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.
That is collective punishment.
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.
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".
[1]: https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Embargoes-and-S...
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.
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.
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 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?
First, as a German (!), I always have a hard time with articles that claim bombing Germany in WW2 somehow wasn’t justified. What would have been the alternative? Leave the regime in power? Concede half or more of Europe? Shrug your shoulders and accept the industrial scale genocide? Note that almost the entire population was part of this murderous machine in some capacity, and to some extent willingly so. To have any hope of democratizing Germany at all, the defeat had to be total. I haven’t seen very credible evidence that this could have been accomplished with milder measures.
Second, there’s an important ethical difference between sanctions and strategic bombing. The attacker chooses what to bomb. With sanctions, the target nation can choose which sectors of their economy their limited resources keep going into. Yes, autocracies will reliably loot and starve their population for the benefit of the military and their political friends. But that’s still their choice, not ours, and I think that’s an important distinction in terms of the moral implications.
There's a distinction between military action and indiscriminate bombing of civilian population centers (eg Dresden, Tokyo). "Strategic bombing" here specifically refers to a policy of total destruction that intentionally leads to massive civilian death. It's the same policy that led to the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This isn't an argument against any form of bombing.
> With sanctions, the target nation can choose which sectors of their economy their limited resources keep going into
In some ways that's worse. Put it this way: who do you think is bearing the brunt of sanctions in Russia? Is it Putin and the oligarchs or the poor?
Not that I'm defending strategic bombing (I'm really not) but at least there's a chance you may take out noteworthy targets. With sanctions you definitely won't.
The whole idea idea of sanctions is twofold:
1. Starve the war machine of resources; and
2. Prompt the populace to take actions against their leadership.
The second has shown to be incredibly ineffective. The premise is a dangerous one too. Why? Because it's the same argument used to support terrorism.
Consider instead that 10,000 people collectively want food (necessities), Pokemon cards (luxuries) and electronics for military equipment (materiel). Before sanctions they bought all of these things. With sanctions they cannot. What will be the impact? The military will still get their requipment and the military as well as the rich and powerful will still get food (and probably their Pokemon cards) while the poor and vulnerable will starve.
This is a major flaw in the analysis of the Ukraine situation. The Biden admin has bungled this affair and placed the Ukrainian people in the position of pawns with zero chance of victory who are getting their country blown up to only end up with less land and likely less sovereignty. The administration has focused the entire conflict straight to war, discouraging diplomacy and encouraging brinksmanship.
The sanctions were foolishly over estimated when applied to a country like Russia which is one of the most self-sufficient countries in the world with huge trading partners that are not afraid of the US’s empty threats. Is the US going to go after China for trading with Russia while the vast amount of its technology and goods are assembled there? The US gave up its dominance by pushing globalization as a “strategy” that eviscerated its manufacturing of critical hardware and technology. The US is now a paper tiger.
Maybe we'd do sanctions, cross our fingers, and hope that heavily entrenched Taiwan would be able to defend itself.
Who knows? It is the mystery of strategic ambiguity. They've been, while maybe not getting along, getting by for the last couple decades. So, hopefully we'll never find out what exactly the plan is.
Luckily Taiwan built a modern economy, where most of the value is in the people who live there (rather than natural resources). And they are pretty well entrenched. The amount of force required to conquer the place would probably slay the golden goose as a side effect. Surely China's government can see the benefit of doing peaceful business there...
Things are working out for China at the moment. No reason to press the issue, possibly upsetting the favorable status quo, until they are powerful enough that they know nobody will say anything.
Not even touching the political aspect (Ukrainian nationalism being clearly anti-Russian long before 2014), for the Russian military having well established NATO military bases in Ukraine and Georgia is many times worse than for US to have Russian bases in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America (and you should remember how US reacted to the possibility of those). And no, the Russian military can not responsibly believe in "defensiveness" of NATO for a number of good reasons.
The invasion itself is clearly a bad and desperate move, but it comes after all the previous moves (from trying to be friends with NATO during the pre-Munich years and keeping Ukraine on the hook using the Minsk agreements) were exhausted and it has piled on top of the utter failure of Russian policy on the Ukrainian front since 91 (targeting oligarchs instead of population).
If Russia managed to control Ukraine, even at terrible but temporary cost in 100 years Russia would be much better off with Ukraine than without. It would make Russia even more serious player on so many markets.
They never drew their economic power from people. They could exterminate all Ukrainians and still come on top economically in the long term if they controlled the land.
As for gas, we can see how overt declarations about going off carbon fuels are squaring against reality where German leaders are practically crawling up Putins ass in the middle of the war to ensure harmoneous future cooperation with a country that has only carbon fuels.
Yes we have a law saying we will defend Taiwan. No we actually won't. Because we can't.
It is worth noting that it isn't that easy to invade Taiwan. At its closest point, 21 miles separates England from France. On a clear day you can see the white cliffs of Dover from France. Yet that 21 mile gap has meant that the last time England was successfully invaded was almost 1000 years ago (in 1066 to be precise). For almost 5 years the Germans had uncontested control of Western Europe and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.
From the other side, the D-Day invasion took 2+ years of planning and massive resources to cross the English Channel with sufficient force not to get immediately wiped out.
Chinca could probably do it but the cost would be incredibly high. Airlifting would take a lot and be vulnerable to air defenses. Sea is a much more practical option but vulnerable to many defenses too.
No, China sucks it up because US is a nuclear power.
https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/amateur-hour-part-i-the-ch...
The goal is clearly to avoid having the conflict in the first place. To do that you must make clear to the opposing side where the line is and that they should not cross it.
The policy until now was not to appear weak, but to maintain an ambiguity, cynically allowing the US to partly deter an attack, preventing Taiwan from declaring indepence and maintaining the option of not getting involved without losing credibility.
By my armchair amateur analysis I think that while the policy worked great in the past, it looks like now it is starting to fail to deter and the option of not getting involved without losing credibility was always an illusion. The only thing it achieves now is the prevention of Taiwan declaring independence.
To me at least it looks it's time to make it clear that Taiwan will be defended, in order to deter war.
Sanctions are just modern day siege warfare. Go look at the 80 years war between the Dutch and Spanish for some of the longest and most interesting sieges in history. In almost all examples one can find sieges or sanctions almost never result in a local popularion rising up against their local elites and leadership. The fact that this is not more widely discussed in American sanctions discourse is a testament to American war propaganda effectiveness. Name one country where American sanctions have resulted in a local population regime changing their leadership. I can't think of any. Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, N Korea, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and of course Russia.
Go look at the list and find a single country under US sanctions where the USA has achieved regime change because of sanctions.
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
Go look at the history of countries the US has sanctioned and try and find one that resulted in regime change. You will not find any.
Instead sanctions typically have the effect of prolonging conflict and solidifying the power structures of the local regime and elites. They're punitive and they affect the poorest of a country. The UN says the greatest humanitarian disaster right now is in in Yemen, and that's directly caused by US and UK sanctions. It won't win the war for the Saudis and UAE, but it's starving hundreds of thousands of Yemenis.
Sanctions against Cuba did not remove Castro. Instead it provided his regime an ability to control food distribution. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Cuban people and their ability to live under US sanctions, but even if I hated Communism in my bones I would recognise that US sanctions on Cuba have been an abject failure.
Black markets and smuggling develop under sanctions and these get controlled by those in power. Sanctions make it much easier for established power structures to survive and thrive. Suddenly people can't get fuel, food and other essentials. They need to come to those in power and beg for them. So those in power can decide who gets these essential items, and even better yet, blame their enemies on the fact that they have to be rationed. Sanctions are both a material and propaganda gift to the regimes the US says they want to dethrone.
So who benefits from sanctions in the USA, why do they keep imposing them? I think the answer to this question is really complex. Partly because there is both real political will in the USA to see regime change in sanctioned countries and people who benefit materially from sanctions knowing that they will not succeed.
If sanctions are so bad at achieving their stated objectives, why does the USG keep imposing them? This is the interesting question.
I disagree. First, the railroad already existed. You can argue its use in war was new. The Germans notably built railroads to the front at huge scale. But this presupposes a relatively static front, which was the reality of WWI. Probably the most important technological development was neither of these things: it was artillery.
I cannot recommend enough Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. There is a 6 part series called A Blueprint for Armageddon [1] that is well worth the 30+ hours it'll take to listen to.
Additionally, the full power of railroads (in terms of logistics) wasn't unleashed until the 1920s. Why? The invention of the humble pallet. I highly recommend reading this [2].
> Today the closest analogue to the logic of the strategic bomber lies in the world of economics. I speak of sanctions.
I 100% agree: economic sanctions are violence and not that far removed from strategic bombing. It's honestly a little surprising to hear an American saying this.
Sanctions ultimately are a form of collective punishment and in many such circumstances we consider that a war crime for good reason. In the 1990s, then US Ambassador to the UN later Us Secretary of STate Madeleine Albright was quoted as saying [3]:
> "We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima," Stahl said. "And, you know, is the price worth it?"
> "I think that is a very hard choice," Albright answered, "but the price, we think, the price is worth it."
The author then goes on to argue (which again is surprising) that sanctions are largely ineffective and will continue to be so in the case of Russia. 100% agree, which is why that even though Putin was and is the bad guy for an unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine, US policy towards Ukraine was completely reckless because we have no effective way to counter an opponent with a nuclear arsenal in armed conflict.
All of this was warned about in 2015 [4].
[1]: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blu...
[2]: https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/52/hodes.php
[3]: https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-ira...
You cannot, the Prussian victories against Austria and France during the latter half of the 19th century were achieved on the back of their very efficient use of (military-designed) railways.