So what's wrong with sanctions as an instrument of attrition?
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.
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.
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.
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.
What? My understanding was that the revolution in Iran happened during a period of relative economic prosperity.
contradicts
> potentially seize nearby resources from adjacent countries.
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?
My counter-point is that almost everyone from my friends, family and colleagues are upset about the war, and many left the country
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?