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Comment by yucky | Hacker News Reader

I love how we here in the US just assume we have the right to tell Turkey and UAE who they can do business with. As if they don't have their own interests.

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Okay, hope their interests aren’t in doing business in the US if they want to circumvent US sanctions.

We absolutely have the right to draw moral lines in the sand: if you do business with brutal dictatorships, you are the enemy too.

Yeah, but no one likes to get moral lectures from hypocrites. We Americans sure do like self-determination, just not for anyone else.

Dictatorships aren’t self determination.

Is it lost on you that this specific action is literally in defence of self determination in the context of the entire point of the war. Such an incredibly lazy take.

> if you do business with brutal dictatorships, you are the enemy too.

Why is the US doing business with Saudi Arabia? Let's see how your moral lines bend around the agenda.

Sanction and export controls are used by governments around the world as a means to further their foreign policy and national security interests, not just the US. Further these regulations always govern both the export and re-export of the goods and services being sold. They are useless otherwise.

This is playing out right now in the EU with Switzerland and Germany debating allowing armaments to be re-exported to Ukraine.[1]

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/switzerland-rethinks-neutral...

Turkey is a nato member - military alliance that russia is at war with (by their own admission) so it is sad that we even need to tell them anything

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