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Comment by mandevil | Hacker News Reader

25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like.

He recently revisited that in FP magazine (https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi...) arguing for keeping sanctions on Russia even though they clearly aren't going to coerce Russia into abandoning their war in Ukraine. The first reason is to re-enforce the global norm against territorial expansion. We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce. And the other reason is to weaken their economy for the grinding war of attrition that is currently happening, and not make territorial expansion easy for them.

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> 25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like.

Sanctions are a negative-rate compounding system. Sarah Paine from the US Naval War College:

> People look at sanctions and go, “Oh, they don't work because you don't make whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing.” What they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's annoying you over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea. It's powerful over several generations.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcVSgYz5SJ8&t=29m03s

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_C._M._Paine

And what difference have North Korean sanctions made geopolitically? North and South Korea are nowhere near a peaceful resolution, and North Korea has advanced its nuclear arsenal significantly, with a repertoire that could even hit US coastal cities.

North Korean citizens have now normalized to poverty and destitution after generations of sanctions. There are quite a few of them working alongside the South Asian labour force in the Middle East, engaged in slavish labour that the Gulf nations are often criticized for.

SK has a stronger military than NK and twice the population. Of course a large part of that is internal economic failure due to central planning.

The stronger military doesn't matter when NK has nuclear weapons, which deter any "unification efforts". Sure, South Koreans are doing great, but what difference did sanctions make to the lives of North Koreans?

You seem to be looking for some other outcome. NK with the economy of SK would have been a nuclear threat decades ago and would be stockpiling more nuclear weapons than the US has given their relative GDP allocations..

Would it be nice if sanctions were equivalent to invasion and does that matter to the argument that they are better to implement than do nothing?

North Korea has no dearth of access to nuclear weapons. They get enough raw material from countries other than Canada and the tech they need from China, Pakistan and now Russia. So no, sanctions have not harmed their nuclear programme.

But what they've done is worsen the lot for the layman North Korean.

North Korea was already a nuclear threat decades ago. Where they were lagging behind was in ICBMs that could reach the continental United States.

North Korea's nuclear program has been slow and you give financial ability as a way out of it.. Decades ago is still decades late, then there is the dollar short aspect of their program.

I still have no idea what you think is an alternative that would have made a North Korea with South Korea's economy a great thing for arms control.

Keeping North Korea poor has all been waste of time unless our goal was to have 75 years of "wasted time" before a potentially uncontrollable escalation with China.

The thing is, sanctions damage both the sanctioned nation and the sanctioner.

I'm not really optimistic about western Europe's willingness to absorb damage in it economy in order to damage Russia. France's government expenditures are 55% of GDP, much of it financed by borrowing. That's the level maintained by major powers in the world wars. Can the French state demand more from a private sector that's funding the equivalent of a total war?

Worse yet, western European politics gives you the strong impression all these expenditures are necessary to prevent the election of a pro-Russian government or a bloody revolution.

Hence why sanctions seem to be something of a joke.

Military operations would do that as well. Ukraine is destroying Russia's oil and gas industry right now. Sanctions or not, that oil and gas is becoming unavailable. Either way, preventing innocent Ukrainians being slaughtered with your money will do harm to your economy; continuing to get cheap oil from Russia inevitably pays for evil.

Might as well do whatever is most effective, which is likely to be harsh sanctions followed by military action to fully enforce them.

> and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce

The “global community” you’re referring to consists of America and its client states—only around 1/8th of the world’s population.

Yeah, it seems hard to say military intervention is preferable to increased accounting and recordkeeping requirements. Or maybe sheltered is a better way to put. Which is a good thing! For most people alive on Earth right now haven't had to deal with wars of territorial expansion. Yes wars exist, and yes territorial expansion by military might conitnues, and military occupations from the US certainly don't help. But overall we're in a point of relative stability.

The same Dan Dexter that pushed for the Iraq war? Should we treat his opinions as such?

I was thinking the same thing. The entire war in Iraq seems to contradict any putatively held ideals around the idea of not redrawing borders.

While an incompetent failure and eventually downright vile, it was hardly an annexation.

>> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders

What are the current borders of Yugoslavia?

Did anybody in the west argue that redrawing the borders of Yugoslavia was against global norms?

Did you?

Or British India for that matter.

The federal entity Yugoslavia ceased to exists, but the borders are actually the same as they were in socialist Yugoslavia.

> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce

The previous Russian imperial project, the Soviet Union, ended 35 years ago, not 80. It's easy to overlook that they forcibly redrew borders and kept them redrawn for decades (and still to this day do keep some territories they conquered in imperialist wars when they were still allied with Nazi Germany).

It's not like ww2 where you have increasingly fewer people who were old enough to consciously experience it. It's very likely that most people on this forum were around for the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian imperialism.

The USSR split up into 15 smaller states 35 years ago. But those 15 smaller states combined are exactly the same territory as the former USSR- none of her (many, many) neighbors took the opportunity to reach in and fiddle with borders, to redraw this or that boundary that they had wanted, to try and take back parts of their former country that Stalin had stolen back in 1945.

No one is saying that states will never collapse, will never split up, will never secede. But the fact that no existing state tried to take advantage of the confusion in the USSR and gain revenge for an ancient wrong? That was the result of this global norm, which held up even as the USSR (and Yugoslavia) fell apart. And that is a very good thing.

There is no 80-year norm against redrawing borders. 80 years ago, Crimea was a part of the Russian SSR - now it's part of a free and independent Ukraine.

Eastern Europe looks a heck of a lot different, as did British India.

In all fairness, 80 years ago, the world was on the cusp of a massive border redraw, but the Phillipine Islands were still a US territory.

> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce.

Cool story bro. Almost like Kosovo never happened.

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