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.
Or rather if you start aiming for democracy (the actual definition, not the 200 co-opted bastardized definitions,) that's where you always end up, as people from Plato to American founding fathers clearly understood.
Which is very difficult to do. Even if you ignore that doing so often means leaving behind your home, friends, family, culture, job, etc. to go to somewhere unfamiliar. Most countries, especially the countries that you would want to move to, don't just let you in because you want to. You probably need to have a job lined up, there may be a lottery, it will almost certainly be expensive, etc. And if you are in certain authoritative regimes, you don't just have to worry about another country letting you in, your home country might not let you out.
The only real way to withdraw consent would be political violence.
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.
And we rarely see meaningful change anywhere because electing politicians is barely connected to the actual outcomes people want.
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.
This. The fact that people in Europe and the US had to fight tooth and nail for workers rights and were opposed by a conglomerate of government force, corporate powers and organized crime gets all to easily forgotten.
The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership.
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.
"The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership."
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.
> point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA
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.
Ironically the amount of sanctions the US put in place around the world is a large driving force for the decline of LIO and emergence of things like BRICS and SCO. I'm sure sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela are going to lead to regime change any moment now. The more you know, the more grotesque it all becomes, fortunately most know nothing.
Jain, as Germans say. It is not impossible to transfer the money (e.g. if you by a chance have accounts in certain banks on either side). Russian foreign trade still exists, Russian tourists still buy tours and spend money abroad etc. It’s even more complicated picture, of course.
> The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership.
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.
That's interesting, but (at least from a quick look and a few text searches) they don't seem to explain what their "sanction contribution score" is. How are they sure that the cases where they "worked" are not regression to the mean (some authoritarian regimes just fall from time to time)? And how are they sure that there is not an equal number of cases where they do the opposite of what they intend? (maybe the Castrist regime would have fallen already if the country had been allowed to develop without sanctions).
> they don't seem to explain what their "sanction contribution score" is
“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.
I am citing here from the conclusions of that book (better, have a look yourself):
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.
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.
>> The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership.
>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.
If anything I'd say it has the opposite of the intended effect sometimes.
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.
The bombing of Nazi Germany in return had the same effect. Due you think people will flock to an enemy, that bombs them every night? No, they will put all their strength into trying to prevent the bombs from falling down in the first place.
I mean the US was seen as a favorable enemy, but that was more to the USSR being way worse and due to the post-war behaviour. I still see the effects of e.g. WW2 allied bombing, when walking through my city. And the railway system in (East) Germany has never recovered and this is still causing problems.
No country should generally decide something for people of another country, but let's say it's a exceptional case and it's a war tactic, as a response to an external threat.
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".
It also makes it harder to build weapons for example. Ruzzians for example rely on western chips and other parts for their weapon systems and due to the sanctions they need to smuggle those parts, which makes it more expansive for them.
I suspect a reason for sanctions is that it allows the government applying them to look like they're doing something to their voters.
It's an effective way of scoring points without spending any resources. They know they're ineffective, but they also know the general public doesn't know that.
For instance the EU very publicly applying sanctions against Russia while with less fanfare continuing to give them billions for gas.
Telling people to throw their lives away to provoke a civil war is one of the nastiest rhetorical tricks you hear when people talk about oppressive regimes.
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.
It worked pretty well for most east bloc countries. Granted, they had to wait until the Soviet Union was weak to break away, but couldn't sanctions be one of the tools to get there faster?
I did say "most", and I stand by that. Look at most of Central Europe, the Baltics, Ukraine...
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).
>It worked pretty well for most east bloc countries.
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.
> 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.
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.
No it's also just to deny those countries resources to come after the rest of us.
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.
Is the concept here that a government, which may not be oppressive enough to spark a domestic uprising (and might even be broadly accepted by the majority of its own citizens due to common moral values or other merits), should be destabilized by external forces to provoke discontent and shift blame onto the government?
> point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership
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].)
Sanctions don't work. Syria didn't collapse because of sanctions, but because of a very long civil war and, more importantly, a sudden imbalance in external forces (Russia was preoccupied with Ukraine). I don't think there has ever been a case where a country, or its people, changed the regime because of sanctions. Never. North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Palestine, and much of Africa are examples. Wars and revolutions change regimes. I would even argue that sanctions help regimes stay in power. When an external force imposes a threat (sanctions) on people, those people don't see the outside as "saviours" but as an enemy. They often resent the country that imposed the sanctions more than their own government, and they have no desire to fight an external enemy on behalf of a domestic dictator.
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.
> 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.
No. I wouldn't. Because it makes it easier for the stronger power to dominate without hot wars. Sanctions cost the U.S. very little when used against Iran, but for Iranians they are extremely hard and disproportionately expensive. A hot war would be far more costly for the U.S., and the higher the expected cost, the less likely policymakers are to choose it.
…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.
My point exactly. It lasted 12 days. How much did it cost? How much you think would cost 5 years of war with Iran? And how much did sanctions cost Iranians (economy + lives) past 40 years. Afghanistan war costed 2t for 20 years of war. That number would be reached withing months in a war with Iran.
> The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership.
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.
