My understanding of sanctions is that they’re designed to provoke hardship and unrest inside of the target country.
In some sense, the people of a nation are at least partially collectively responsible for what that government does. This principle has been widely accepted, at least in the west, since the Nuremberg trials. If you subscribe to this widely held belief, then the Russian citizenry therefore bears some responsibility for the invasion via their consent to obey and support the existing regime.
A people have the moral obligation to overthrow a tyrannical government. The issue is that nearly everyone finds it easy to turn a blind eye if they themselves are not materially affected by the tyranny. I think this is a facet of human nature rather than a moral failing of any particular group of people.
If you accept that the economic hardship caused by sanctions is a collective punishment doled out in response to this collective guilt, the moral core is much greyer than this post asserts.
At a practical level, economic downturns nearly always precede regime change or institutional reform. I think you can draw a straight line from economic disruption, through political unrest, and to either social or political change.
It seems to me that a man who becomes poor while watching his government spend billions on an aggressive war is more likely to protest that war than a man whose status is unchanged.
I don’t have the information to litigate whether the sanctions were effective as a deterrent. In some sense they were obviously ineffective since war resulted, but I think it’s impossible for me as a layman to accurately assess this without the benefit of historical hindsight and more declassified diplomatic information than we’re likely to get in our lifetime.
Does this weaken our position relative to China? Maybe? Again I think this is a very complex issue that I’m not really capable of answering. But I would suggest that “we” (the United States) are at least showing a very united front with the EU which seems like a relevant consideration.
I also consider myself to be someone who loves his country, and I appreciate you taking the time to write up a viewpoint thay contrasts with what seems to be the zeitgeist. Thank you.
Edit: corrected various grammar and spelling errors.
While I think the post itself is written in a way that’s uncharitable towards proponents of sanctions, if the only argument for them was the “collective guilt/responsibility” argument you give here, I would have to say that sanctions are indeed both ineffective and immoral.
Western leaders have said again and again that they believe this is the war of the regime currently in control of the Russian government, and not of the Russian people. Boris Johnson went on television to say to the Russian people “I believe this war is not in your name” in Russian. That’s flatly inconsistent with the idea that they bear some “partial responsibility” for failing to stand up to Putin’s regime (what are they even supposed to do?)
The post is correct about one thing: sanctions have a very poor empirical record of affecting regime change. Japan didn’t undergo regime change because of US sanctions on it leading up to the Pacific War. Saddam wasn’t toppled as a result of the crippling sanctions placed on Iraq throughout the 1990s. The regime in Iran is still as strong as ever, and shows no signs of being toppled by a popular revolution triggered by Western sanctions on the country. In contrast, I can’t think of a single example in which sanctions led to regime change in a country. Maybe this is my lack of imagination—can you think of such a case?
Better arguments have been offered in favor of sanctions. For example, the Biden administration said that one of the primary purposes of the sanctions they have placed on Russia is to hurt the Russian economy in order to undercut Russia’s ability to project hard power, and sanctions can indeed be successful at doing this.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find this language of “collective responsibility” to be repugnant. You’re responsible for something if you could have taken actions which had a substantial influence over whether it happened or not. Ordinary people simply don’t have any such influence over the actions of their government. It’s true they have the power to affect change if they can coordinate their actions, but it’s hardly reasonable to blame individual players in a game with millions of players for getting stuck in a bad equilibrium that they can’t climb out of. If we applied these same moral standards to ourselves, all of us would be condemned without an exception.
What we should think of is how to provide the right kind of stimulus from the outside to change the situation, not cast blame at people for doing what’s best for themselves, their family and their friends.
Sanctions have been the main official justification for Putin’s prolonged rule and his mistakes. They were the fuel and the proofs for his “The World Is Against Us” rhetorics. Now they enabled him to introduce some interesting laws, like 15 years of corrective labor colony for “spreading fakes about the special operation of liberating Ukraine from the Nazis”
People whose well-being has been affected by the war will not protest. It is always better to be poor than to serve 15 years of corrective labor colony. Period. And just in case, life in Russia is still much better than life in Ukraine, at least because war is on the Ukrainian territory.
There still were and probably will be people who protest and protested, not because of the money interests you’ve described but because of their genuine repulsion towards the war, especially this war. Well, many of them got or will get their punishments. Also, they’ll be a good picture for a TV report on a Russian channel called “The Enemy is brainwashing our nation, this is exactly why we must focus on searching for traitors and disposing of them.” That’s how it all will end.
Nobody will start an armed protest on the same reason why there’ve been almost no slightly armed protests in Russia for the recent decades. In 1917 a revolution led to the establishment of a totalitarian state, nobody wants that to repeat.
This is the reason why those sanctions aren’t capable of giving a start to a revolution. If they do provoke something inside the target country, that’s the unrest towards those stupid Westerners who interfere in things they don’t understand.
Sanctions might have an effect, though. If they manage to completely destabilise the Russian economy. But the costs for the whole world might be huge. In any case, that’s to be left for another speculation
And for god’s sake, I’m not saying that sanctions should not be taken. Apart from sending weapons, sanctions are the only way the West can help Ukraine without actually deploying their troops. That’s the reason for the sanctions, I suppose.
My understanding of sanctions is that they’re designed to provoke hardship and unrest inside of the target country.
In some sense, the people of a nation are at least partially collectively responsible for what that government does. This principle has been widely accepted, at least in the west, since the Nuremberg trials. If you subscribe to this widely held belief, then the Russian citizenry therefore bears some responsibility for the invasion via their consent to obey and support the existing regime.
A people have the moral obligation to overthrow a tyrannical government. The issue is that nearly everyone finds it easy to turn a blind eye if they themselves are not materially affected by the tyranny. I think this is a facet of human nature rather than a moral failing of any particular group of people.
If you accept that the economic hardship caused by sanctions is a collective punishment doled out in response to this collective guilt, the moral core is much greyer than this post asserts.
At a practical level, economic downturns nearly always precede regime change or institutional reform. I think you can draw a straight line from economic disruption, through political unrest, and to either social or political change.
It seems to me that a man who becomes poor while watching his government spend billions on an aggressive war is more likely to protest that war than a man whose status is unchanged.
I don’t have the information to litigate whether the sanctions were effective as a deterrent. In some sense they were obviously ineffective since war resulted, but I think it’s impossible for me as a layman to accurately assess this without the benefit of historical hindsight and more declassified diplomatic information than we’re likely to get in our lifetime.
Does this weaken our position relative to China? Maybe? Again I think this is a very complex issue that I’m not really capable of answering. But I would suggest that “we” (the United States) are at least showing a very united front with the EU which seems like a relevant consideration.
I also consider myself to be someone who loves his country, and I appreciate you taking the time to write up a viewpoint thay contrasts with what seems to be the zeitgeist. Thank you.
Edit: corrected various grammar and spelling errors.
While I think the post itself is written in a way that’s uncharitable towards proponents of sanctions, if the only argument for them was the “collective guilt/responsibility” argument you give here, I would have to say that sanctions are indeed both ineffective and immoral.
Western leaders have said again and again that they believe this is the war of the regime currently in control of the Russian government, and not of the Russian people. Boris Johnson went on television to say to the Russian people “I believe this war is not in your name” in Russian. That’s flatly inconsistent with the idea that they bear some “partial responsibility” for failing to stand up to Putin’s regime (what are they even supposed to do?)
The post is correct about one thing: sanctions have a very poor empirical record of affecting regime change. Japan didn’t undergo regime change because of US sanctions on it leading up to the Pacific War. Saddam wasn’t toppled as a result of the crippling sanctions placed on Iraq throughout the 1990s. The regime in Iran is still as strong as ever, and shows no signs of being toppled by a popular revolution triggered by Western sanctions on the country. In contrast, I can’t think of a single example in which sanctions led to regime change in a country. Maybe this is my lack of imagination—can you think of such a case?
Better arguments have been offered in favor of sanctions. For example, the Biden administration said that one of the primary purposes of the sanctions they have placed on Russia is to hurt the Russian economy in order to undercut Russia’s ability to project hard power, and sanctions can indeed be successful at doing this.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find this language of “collective responsibility” to be repugnant. You’re responsible for something if you could have taken actions which had a substantial influence over whether it happened or not. Ordinary people simply don’t have any such influence over the actions of their government. It’s true they have the power to affect change if they can coordinate their actions, but it’s hardly reasonable to blame individual players in a game with millions of players for getting stuck in a bad equilibrium that they can’t climb out of. If we applied these same moral standards to ourselves, all of us would be condemned without an exception.
What we should think of is how to provide the right kind of stimulus from the outside to change the situation, not cast blame at people for doing what’s best for themselves, their family and their friends.
Sanctions will not work this way, period.
It is obvious if you think about it for a while.
Sanctions have been the main official justification for Putin’s prolonged rule and his mistakes. They were the fuel and the proofs for his “The World Is Against Us” rhetorics. Now they enabled him to introduce some interesting laws, like 15 years of corrective labor colony for “spreading fakes about the special operation of liberating Ukraine from the Nazis”
People whose well-being has been affected by the war will not protest. It is always better to be poor than to serve 15 years of corrective labor colony. Period. And just in case, life in Russia is still much better than life in Ukraine, at least because war is on the Ukrainian territory.
There still were and probably will be people who protest and protested, not because of the money interests you’ve described but because of their genuine repulsion towards the war, especially this war. Well, many of them got or will get their punishments. Also, they’ll be a good picture for a TV report on a Russian channel called “The Enemy is brainwashing our nation, this is exactly why we must focus on searching for traitors and disposing of them.” That’s how it all will end.
Nobody will start an armed protest on the same reason why there’ve been almost no slightly armed protests in Russia for the recent decades. In 1917 a revolution led to the establishment of a totalitarian state, nobody wants that to repeat.
This is the reason why those sanctions aren’t capable of giving a start to a revolution. If they do provoke something inside the target country, that’s the unrest towards those stupid Westerners who interfere in things they don’t understand.
Sanctions might have an effect, though. If they manage to completely destabilise the Russian economy. But the costs for the whole world might be huge. In any case, that’s to be left for another speculation
And for god’s sake, I’m not saying that sanctions should not be taken. Apart from sending weapons, sanctions are the only way the West can help Ukraine without actually deploying their troops. That’s the reason for the sanctions, I suppose.