It must be really frustrating be on the receiving end of sanctions. The ugly truth about sanctions is that they punish the people more than the aristocracy. But they're still better than wars.
>I read hackernews on a daily basis and I visit lots of different websites regularly. I am almost always on my VPN as I am internally firewalled by the government and externally shooed because of the sanctions, so I am probably missing some of these heart-warming messages:
>>Iranian IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians.
> I actually do not blame the people who do this. I think there is a fundamental misconception that people think because "Islamic Republic" has the word "Republic" in it, it must be a government of people in charge.
Total war and total information war are the side effects of the Democracy meme. Everyone from a taxi driver to a professor is assumed to be a political actor. The rationale runs something like this, "because you have a vote, you are defacto responsible for the actions of your state and political classes. Vote harder next time."
Meanwhile the individuals involved never explicitly consented to be governed. Even if there were a meaningful democratic process, it doesn't follow that the individual could withdraw consent. Ironically one of the suggested avenues for withdrawing consent in a democracy is to refuse to vote.
The key upside of democracy imo is then that most people do not see a reason to use violence; They can vote and never need to withdraw consent that extremely.
Now we have a pacified populace that allows corruption to run freely and keeps repeating "violence is never the answer" while forgetting meaningful change almost always requires it.
Never forget we wouldn't even have weekends if people hadn't died for it.
I wish we never needed violence but it seems to be wishful thinking rather than reality. Will people oppose the next Hitler by ranting on Twitter and peaceful protests? Something tells me that won't work.
It's a bit paradoxical, but almost all real change is done by the threat of violence, and almost none of it is achieved by applying violence.
But you are right that as people more radically reject violence, democracy dies and changes stop. Even though violence almost never achieves anything.
And if your're someone sliding into nasty leadership / government situation you have to realize there will be a consequence to that and that the perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.
Then?
This works about a third of the time [1].
What does is incentivising domestic policy changes. We saw that with the nuclear deal. But then Trump blew it up because Obama did it.
(On another level, sanctions degrade capability. If there is no room for peace, at least you can limit your adversary’s economy and thus martial production. If regime change randomly happens, you can use lifting sanctions to blow oxygen on the new government’s flame [2].)
[1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1, page 159
[2] https://the307.substack.com/p/how-sanctions-function-as-a-to...
Sanctions punish ordinary people, many of whom are already suffering under the regime. So they end up opposing both an internal and an external enemy. In the long run, sanctions probably destroy and cost far more lives than wars. It's a sadistic way to try to crush an enemy.
> Syria didn't collapse because of sanctions
Nobody said it did.
> don't think there has ever been a case where a country, or its people, changed the regime because of sanctions. Never
Literally a source with a page number, and, in a neighbouring comment, a table with the specifics.
Like, if you had a button that could convert the world’s hot wars into mutual embargoes, would you not push it? Up the stakes: mutual embargo plus embargoed by their leading trade partner.
…we just had a hot war with Iran. It probably cost us less than our sanctions.
I’ll say this: you’re consistent in your position and I respect that. I just don’t think many people share the view that people getting physically torn apart by munitions is better than have a less-comfortable, possibly borderline, life.
Idk, how much?
Very easy to say. Quite hard to pull off. People in authoritarian countries have very little leverage and would like just to live fullfilling lives.
I’m not saying ”don’t do sanctions” but this mechanistic outcome is highly improbable.
”perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.”
Um - the most polite way of stating this is that this view of how political systems work is highly delusional at best.
Ruling party depends on _elite_ _compliance_.
Iranians had several mass uprisings that were suppressed by the military. And the top military and religious authorities in Iran have no problems whatsoever living well, even with all the sanctions.
Just like the Russian elites, btw. They can't visit France as easily anymore, but there's always Dubai available. That can't care less where your money comes from.
That's the theory, but has it ever worked?
That something that never works (not even in cases where it has been going on for multiple generations, as in the case of Cuba or Iran) keeps being tried makes it impossible to believe that the intention is making it "work" in the sense you mean. The sanctions are just to sink those countries for political interest. Which in some cases makes sense (e.g. Russia, as it's invading Ukraine and sinking its economy can be a deterrent in that respect), but in others is definitely evil.
Yes. About a third of the time [1].
[1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1 page 159
“The success score is an index on a scale of 1 to 16, found by multiplying the policy result index by the sanctions contribution index” (page 77).
Simpler: Table 4A.1 shows their scoring for individual cases. They break at 9 for success versus failure, so maybe eyeball those to see if they gel with your intuition. If not, adjust and re-run the numbers.
My eyeballing suggests it would be quite difficult to zero out the list.
Overall, we found sanctions to be at least partially successful in 34 percent of the cases that we documented.
By our standards, successful cases are those with an overall success score of 9 or higher. We emphasize that a score of 9 does not mean that economic sanctions achieved a foreign policy triumph. It means only that sanctions made a modest contribution to a goal that was partly realized, often at some political cost to the sender country.
Yet in many cases, it is fair to say that sanctions were a necessary component of the overall campaign that focused primarily on the projection of military force.
Second, we classify some sanctions as failing to produce a real change in the target’s behavior when their primary if unstated purpose—namely, demonstrating resolve at home, signaling disapproval abroad, or simple punishment—may have been fully realized.
Like, during WW2 the UK was being bombed and ration books and supply shortages were the order of the day. They look back on their endurance of the conditions inflicted upon them as a source of national pride, have to imagine that is the case for many in the sanctioned countries too.
It kinda worked in Syria. The combination of sanctions, plus squatting on sovereign Syrian territory and preventing the government from generating income eventually left Assad's military so hollowed out that that the Turkish-backed rebel faction led by former Al Qaeda members was able to essentially drive to Damascus with minimal resistance.
>That's the theory, but has it ever worked?
The point is not to (directly) instigate regime change, but to influence the actions of the existing regime, as well as other state actors not under sanctions, by demonstrating to them how bad it can get. Make an example and so on.
The suffering of the civilians is not the goal of sanctions but a consequence of the choices their - legitimate or not - leaders make, and which ultimately impacts their ability to engage in foreign trade. No country has an obligation to trade with any other, so if civilians suffer after foreign trade is limited, the agency and moral responsibility is with the regime that failed to secure friendly trade relations. Often, humanitarian exceptions are carved out to limit this.
It definitely "works", in the sense that it's often the only tool available, along with positive reinforcements such as aid and support and the threat of stopping them, which is just another flavor of the same. It's hard to have a benchmark for something that "works" better, since countries are sovereign and by definition have disputes and don't blindly follow any established rules or rulers.
Then half a decade shows that point is not relevant or, the overthrowing is not the point at all.
I too wished the wolrd was that simple. But there are dictatorships, who kill, slaughter, coerce, ... and also all the international affairs from which those people are kept an outsider with zero say by the said government. I don't think we can reduce it to "it's people's fault".
No, that's for consumption by population of the sanctioning country. The people in the know know very well that that never works.
The point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA. Classic mafia strategy.
The exception were the sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine war. Those were unprecedented (including the freezing of the national bank assets and blocking of Swift) and it looks like the western powers really believed that those sanctions will cause economic collapse and regime change in Russia.
This is the symbolic value of sanctions. It’s a part of coalition building and domestic messaging. (Though if you constantly do it this becomes less effective.)
It’s a classic team-building strategy: costly signalling [1]. You see it in mafias, but like, also when a softball team buys matching jerseys.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_e...
What percentage of Russia's foreign transactions went through those banks?
Certainly, normal people can't normally transfer money to/from Russia. The same for almost all companies.
We don't sell them weapons, and we try to limit dual-use technology from being freely available.
Defense tech uses a lot of open source software and commercially available software - letting a regime simply buy technological advantage it can't cultivate is a good way to lose that advantage and then also lose the culture which can create it.
Especially if you’ve just been dumb enough to re-elect that nasty leadership / government on behalf of (and at the behest of) the people who benefit off having that ruling party in office.
In basically every case a bad government is preferable to the destruction, chaos and death a civil war brings. "Just overthrow your government" is ridiculous plea.
And for some it worked out pretty badly. Hungarians rebeled against communism, but that rebellion was put down brutally.
You are correct that towards the end of the Soviet Union many of the client states and Russia itself had popular uprisings which succeeded, but that that point the Communist Government was already failing.
My point is not that no popular uprising has ever worked or that outside pressure can not force the end of some regime, but that telling people that they need to take up arms against their government is an insane proposition.
Even the Asian parts of the USSR mostly had peaceful transitions into independence (and often into the hands of new semi-dictators, but that's beside the point).
Yeah, it will certainly make life better, works every time (no).
After the CIA and the US foreign policy had so much trouble overthrowing the old one and putting that one in place?