So when you say that imposing costly penalties on norm violators “increases the demand” to violate norms, you mean a sort of “as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb” effect where once you violate any norms there’s no longer much incentive not to violate others?
Surely that’s not an adverse consequence of imposing costly penalties as such, it’s about having penalties that vary in the wrong way.
Nuking Russia for invading Ukraine (or, for invading Ukraine and not deposing the guy who ordered the invasion) would be a very bad idea, for sure, but there are penalties intermediate between the present economic sanctions and launching the nukes [citation needed], and OP here isn’t proposing launching the nukes.
So when you say that imposing costly penalties on norm violators “increases the demand” to violate norms, you mean a sort of “as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb” effect where once you violate any norms there’s no longer much incentive not to violate others?
No. It has nothing to do with “once you’ve been punished, you have less to fear”—that’s not my argument at all. There are several ways you can look at my argument, but it’s really talking about the simple fact that if you let relations between two countries get worse, a big war between them becomes more likely.
I gave the example of the Pacific War for this reason: even though the Americans may have thought that the sanctions placed on Japan fell short of active hostilities, from Japan’s point of view that was not true. Furthermore, the American actions against Japan led to Japanese officials thinking that the US was punishing Japan for doing in China what the US had done in the Western hemisphere. This apparent (to them) hypocrisy caused further deterioration in relations until it wasn’t unthinkable to go to a big war to settle the issues once and for all.
I’m really shocked that nobody seems to consider how bad the downstream effects of bad relations between powerful countries can be. It’s all about a narrow consideration of “how do we best punish Russia to disincentivize aggressive behavior”, and nobody seems to be thinking of “what happened from 1991 to 2022 for Russian-American relations to have deteriorated to such a point?”
Do you think that what happened from 1991 to 2022 that made Russian-American relations deteriorate so badly was a matter of “imposing costly penalties”? If so, what costly penalties do you have in mind and what do you think would have been better than imposing them? If not, then to whatever extent it’s an argument against “imposing costly penalties” it seems like actually it’s more an argument against any sort of unfriendliness at all. But maybe I’m missing something there.
My understanding (which is very far indeed from expert) is that Japan didn’t so much view US sanctions as an act of war, as think that US sanctions were doing them so much harm that going to war was the lesser evil. I’m not sure how much difference this distinction actually makes, but it feels as if “a nation will go to war if it thinks that’s the only way to safeguard its interests” and “a nation will go to war if relations with the other party deteriorate far enough” are different stories.
I do agree, though, that it’s reasonable to worry that reacting harshly to another nation’s misdeeds will worsen relations with them and make future conflict more likely. It seems to me that this concern should be weighed against the deterrent effect described in OP, rather than picking one of them and saying that it’s wrong to worry about the other. OP would be better if it addressed your concern. Your argument would be better if accompanied by some sort of argument about the relative sizes of the two effects.
[EDITED to add:] I would also be interested to know how you think things like Russia’s attack on Ukraine should be handled by the US, the EU, etc. Any sort of attempt to impose costs for it will worsen relations between the US/EU/… and Russia, after all. Would you favour a norm where any country gets to invade any other country and no one else should do anything about it? (Or maybe one where that’s so unless there are explicit NATO-type mutual defence treaties? But a US military response to a Russian invasion of, say, Poland would worsen US-Russia relations. So, again, if you favour something of this sort then the question is how the tradeoffs go.)
Do you think that what happened from 1991 to 2022 that made Russian-American relations deteriorate so badly was a matter of “imposing costly penalties”?
Only some part of it was. As I said, what I’m concerned about is bad relations, regardless of what they were caused by. Threatening someone with penalties unless they do as you say causes relations to worsen, but it’s not the only thing that does so.
My understanding (which is very far indeed from expert) is that Japan didn’t so much view US sanctions as an act of war, as think that US sanctions were doing them so much harm that going to war was the lesser evil. I’m not sure how much difference this distinction actually makes, but it feels as if “a nation will go to war if it thinks that’s the only way to safeguard its interests” and “a nation will go to war if relations with the other party deteriorate far enough” are different stories.
There’s too much to unpack here.
First, something is by my definition an act of war if you think going to war in response to it is an appropriate action. For Japan, therefore, American economic sanctions were so crippling that they regarded it as an act of war even though the Americans did not.
Furthermore, even morally speaking, sanctions are one government threatening people not to engage in commerce with another government. If I threatened all the food stores into your town and frightened them into not selling any food to you, you’d be perfectly justified in regarding that as an attempt on your life. By the same logic, the actions of the US government in prohibiting Americans from doing business with Japan were undercutting a vital interest of the Japanese government by threats of violence. It was more damaging to their war effort in China than killing thousands of Japanese soldiers a month would have been.
In addition, you’re overlooking the wider context of the Pacific War by your narrow focus on “interests”. By any measure, attacking the Union during the American Civil War was in the “national interest” of the UK, since they could see the writing on the wall that if the US became too powerful they would eventually supplant Britain as the most powerful country in the world. However, this possibility was remote and indeed it didn’t happen. The reason is that relations between the US and the UK were simply too good for any British government to be able to make that decision, and it’s likely that the government itself didn’t consider it seriously for the same reason.
With Japan, the situation was different. Japan had experienced a long period of racism and discrimination in the international stage. Japanese immigrants were treated poorly abroad and Japan’s demands for equality between countries were ignored. When after the end of WW1 Japan proposed putting a racial equality clause to the Charter of the League of Nations as the price for handing occupied German concessions on the Chinese mainland back to China, the Entente would not consent to it.
As the final insult here, in negotiations between Japan and the US to resolve the conflict in China peacefully, Japan offered to recognize the Open Door policy in China and withdraw its troops to the antebellum boundaries if this policy were recognized throughout the world: that is, if the US and the UK stopped their actions to keep out Japanese exports from India and South America, Japan would reciprocate and withdraw from China. Of course, this was rejected. The message Japan got from this episode is that it’s fine for the US and the UK to intimidate other countries into closing off their markets to foreign imports, but not fine for Japan to do the same. It’s exactly how Russia and China now feel about Ukraine: why is it fine for the US to invade Iraq but not fine for Russia to invade Ukraine?
I don’t want to write a whole history of the Pacific War here. I’m only trying to say that total war between Japan and the US was only made possible against a backdrop of decades of mistreatment of the Japanese by Western countries. I’m concerned about history repeating itself precisely because people don’t seem to recognize this and continue thinking in terms which would only lead to the situation getting worse.
I do agree, though, that it’s reasonable to worry that reacting harshly to another nation’s misdeeds will worsen relations with them and make future conflict more likely. It seems to me that this concern should be weighed against the deterrent effect described in OP, rather than picking one of them and saying that it’s wrong to worry about the other. OP would be better if it addressed your concern. Your argument would be better if accompanied by some sort of argument about the relative sizes of the two effects.
I did say that I don’t know the relative size and it likely depends on many details, but what I can say is treating Russia as an enemy is what caused the current situation—not the invasion of Ukraine, but the general poor relations between Russia and Western countries. It created the backdrop against which these narrow interest and game-theoretic calculations start making sense. Nobody thinks that way about relations between Canada and the US, because the countries are simply too friendly with each other for this to ever come up.
I would also be interested to know how you think things like Russia’s attack on Ukraine should be handled by the US, the EU, etc.
If you want something that can be done right now and on short notice, making Ukraine a country with a similar international status to Austria or Finland during the Cold War would be one immediate solution.
However, if my way of thinking had prevailed this war would never have happened to begin with. Either the Russians would not have seen NATO as a hostile military alliance or NATO would have refrained from sending lethal arms to Ukraine and stationing thousands of foreign military advisors in Ukrainian territory after Maidan. These are provocative actions that make Russia feel threatened and ratchet up tensions between the US and Russia.
Russia bears just as much, if not more, blame for this process—I don’t want to exonerate them from blame in any way. The same was true of Japan in the Pacific War. However, if one side in these disputes had refused to play the game of ratcheting up tensions, the eventual wars would simply not have happened. In this context it takes two to dance.
a backdrop of decades of mistreatment of the Japanese by Western countries.
I find this a bit difficult to take seriously. The WW2 in the Pacific didn’t start with well-treatment of China and other countries by Japan, either. Naturally Japanese didn’t care about that part of the story, but hey had plenty of other options how they could have responded their the UK or the US trade policy instead of invading Manchuria.
making Ukraine a country with a similar international status to Austria or Finland during the Cold War would be one immediate solution.
This is not a simple task, but rather a tall order. Austria was “made neutral” after it was occupied. Finland signed a peace treaty that put it into effectively similar position. Why would any country submit to such a deal voluntarily? The answer is, they often don’t. Finland didn’t receive significant assistance from the Allies in 1939, yet they decided to defend themselves against the USSR anyway when Stalin attacked.
However, if one side in these disputes had refused to play the game of ratcheting up tensions, the eventual wars would simply not have happened. In this context it takes two to dance.
Sure, but the game theoretic implication is that this kind of strategy favors the first party to take the first step and say “I have an army and a map where this neighboring country belongs to us”.
NATO would have refrained from sending lethal arms to Ukraine and stationing thousands of foreign military advisors in Ukrainian territory after Maidan.
What a weird way to present the causality of events. I am quite confident NATO didn’t have time to send any weapons and certainly not thousands of advisors between Maidan and the war starting. Yanukovich fled 22 February. Antimaidan protests started in Donetsk 1 March and shooting war started in April.
I find this a bit difficult to take seriously. The WW2 in the Pacific didn’t start with well-treatment of China and other countries by Japan, either.
I never said that it did. As I said, “in this context it takes two to dance”.
Naturally Japanese didn’t care about that part of the story, but hey had plenty of other options how they could have responded their the UK or the US trade policy instead of invading Manchuria.
I don’t know why it’s hard for you to believe. In 1918, Fumimaro Konoe (then part of the Japanese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference) wrote an essay titled “Against a Pacifism Centered on England and America” in which he stated the following:
“Japan is limited in territory, poor in natural resources, and has a small population and thus a meager market for manufactured products. If England closed off its colonies, how would we be able to assure the nation’s secure survival? In such a case, the need to ensure its survival would compel Japan to attempt to overthrow the status quo as Germany did before the war.”
Konoe was Prime Minister for most of 1941, resigning in October only after his attempts to negotiate a last-minute settlement with the United States came to nothing. There’s no evidence to suggest he changed his mind, though in 1941 he opposed the war with the United States on pragmatic grounds since he believed Japan would lose.
The question is not about whether Japan could have done something different. Of course they could have. The question is whether decades of animosity contributed to the outbreak of war, and it’s clear the answer is affirmative here. Even the Japanese invasion of China is hard to imagine if Japan had been better treated by the United Kingdom and the United States.
Japan had two key concerns: physical and economic security. They felt their physical security was threatened because they faced two potentially hostile powers in China and the USSR. In the 1920s Japan had cooperated with Western countries within the framework of the Washington Order, in which China was to remain under an “open door policy” with respect to trade and all powers in the Pacific would cooperate to limit the size of their navies. This order, established when China was weak due to internal strife, caused resentment in China and the terms of this order prevented Japan from ensuring their security by striking China when they were weak, so it was quite reasonable for the Japanese to worry about the future.
If war with China or the USSR broke out in the depths of a depression, the US and the UK could have cut their losses and left Japan to fight alone in a ruinous total war. This, more than anything, Japan wished to avoid at all costs.
The concern about economic security is no less important, since the turn to protectionism all around the world following the Great Depression was exactly what Konoe had feared. Its effect on domestic politics in Japan was also pronounced. Since Japan is an island country that relies heavily on trade, the unilateral tariffs and quotas imposed by the US and the UK on Japanese exports right at the depth of the depression came at the worst possible time. This strengthened the hand of militarists who wished to construct the notorious “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere”.
This is not a simple task, but rather a tall order. Austria was “made neutral” after it was occupied. Finland signed a peace treaty that put it into effectively similar position. Why would any country submit to such a deal voluntarily? The answer is, they often don’t. Finland didn’t receive significant assistance from the Allies in 1939, yet they decided to defend themselves against the USSR anyway when Stalin attacked.
All it takes is for NATO to stop selling weapons and sending military advisors into Ukraine. It has nothing to do with what Ukraine wants; if NATO says they won’t do it then the problem would be solved.
Sure, but the game theoretic implication is that this kind of strategy favors the first party to take the first step and say “I have an army and a map where this neighboring country belongs to us”.
My whole point is that there are competing effects in this situation and not considering the resentment that a hostile policy will cause in Russia (or Japan) is a big mistake. I’m not denying that a more lenient policy has this effect, I’m saying it has an offsetting effect which could (and I think does, in the current case with Russia) lower the expected number of war deaths over the next 50 years, say.
What a weird way to present the causality of events. I am quite confident NATO didn’t have time to send any weapons and certainly not thousands of advisors between Maidan and the war starting. Yanukovich fled 22 February. Antimaidan protests started in Donetsk 1 March and shooting war started in April.
How is that weird? NATO supports a movement of regime change in Ukraine. Russia sees it as an act against them and ratchets up tensions by taking over Crimea and supporting separatists in Donetsk & Luhansk. NATO sees it as an act of aggression and starts sending arms & military advisors to Ukraine. Russia sees this as a provocation and responds by full-scale invasion of the country.
I don’t understand what you find weird about this way to present the causality of events. Have I left something out or inaccurately represented anything that happened?
Another way to look at sanctions is that the government is helping coordinate many independent actors. I suspect that most of the people who have halted trading with Russia would have wanted to do so otherwise but would not have been able to because of market forces. The sanctions are the government’s way of saying “market forces are wrong here, all the independent actors can stop trading with Russia”, with the unfortunate side effect that some people are also being forced to not trade with Russia.
This is a purely hypothetical assumption, much like the theory of hypothetical consent as a justification for political authority. Needless to say, I’m not impressed with it.
It is true that in theory there is a coordination problem with sanctions because they are like taxes: the cost to a country of being sanctioned is second order in the magnitude of the sanctions being imposed. This means even an individual who cares about punishing Japan for its war in China can only impose second-order costs on Japan by his participation at the expense of a first-order cost to himself.
The problem is that there isn’t sufficient reason to believe in the real world that governments impose sanctions to solve coordination problems. Everyone can understand that Russian sanctions on foreign countries, such as blocking websites not cooperating with the Russian government or halting trade of various goods with European countries, are actually against the interests of individuals living in Russia. All I’m saying is that the same is true of most sanctions imposed by the United States government or any other government.
So when you say that imposing costly penalties on norm violators “increases the demand” to violate norms, you mean a sort of “as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb” effect where once you violate any norms there’s no longer much incentive not to violate others?
Surely that’s not an adverse consequence of imposing costly penalties as such, it’s about having penalties that vary in the wrong way.
Nuking Russia for invading Ukraine (or, for invading Ukraine and not deposing the guy who ordered the invasion) would be a very bad idea, for sure, but there are penalties intermediate between the present economic sanctions and launching the nukes [citation needed], and OP here isn’t proposing launching the nukes.
No. It has nothing to do with “once you’ve been punished, you have less to fear”—that’s not my argument at all. There are several ways you can look at my argument, but it’s really talking about the simple fact that if you let relations between two countries get worse, a big war between them becomes more likely.
I gave the example of the Pacific War for this reason: even though the Americans may have thought that the sanctions placed on Japan fell short of active hostilities, from Japan’s point of view that was not true. Furthermore, the American actions against Japan led to Japanese officials thinking that the US was punishing Japan for doing in China what the US had done in the Western hemisphere. This apparent (to them) hypocrisy caused further deterioration in relations until it wasn’t unthinkable to go to a big war to settle the issues once and for all.
I’m really shocked that nobody seems to consider how bad the downstream effects of bad relations between powerful countries can be. It’s all about a narrow consideration of “how do we best punish Russia to disincentivize aggressive behavior”, and nobody seems to be thinking of “what happened from 1991 to 2022 for Russian-American relations to have deteriorated to such a point?”
Do you think that what happened from 1991 to 2022 that made Russian-American relations deteriorate so badly was a matter of “imposing costly penalties”? If so, what costly penalties do you have in mind and what do you think would have been better than imposing them? If not, then to whatever extent it’s an argument against “imposing costly penalties” it seems like actually it’s more an argument against any sort of unfriendliness at all. But maybe I’m missing something there.
My understanding (which is very far indeed from expert) is that Japan didn’t so much view US sanctions as an act of war, as think that US sanctions were doing them so much harm that going to war was the lesser evil. I’m not sure how much difference this distinction actually makes, but it feels as if “a nation will go to war if it thinks that’s the only way to safeguard its interests” and “a nation will go to war if relations with the other party deteriorate far enough” are different stories.
I do agree, though, that it’s reasonable to worry that reacting harshly to another nation’s misdeeds will worsen relations with them and make future conflict more likely. It seems to me that this concern should be weighed against the deterrent effect described in OP, rather than picking one of them and saying that it’s wrong to worry about the other. OP would be better if it addressed your concern. Your argument would be better if accompanied by some sort of argument about the relative sizes of the two effects.
[EDITED to add:] I would also be interested to know how you think things like Russia’s attack on Ukraine should be handled by the US, the EU, etc. Any sort of attempt to impose costs for it will worsen relations between the US/EU/… and Russia, after all. Would you favour a norm where any country gets to invade any other country and no one else should do anything about it? (Or maybe one where that’s so unless there are explicit NATO-type mutual defence treaties? But a US military response to a Russian invasion of, say, Poland would worsen US-Russia relations. So, again, if you favour something of this sort then the question is how the tradeoffs go.)
Only some part of it was. As I said, what I’m concerned about is bad relations, regardless of what they were caused by. Threatening someone with penalties unless they do as you say causes relations to worsen, but it’s not the only thing that does so.
There’s too much to unpack here.
First, something is by my definition an act of war if you think going to war in response to it is an appropriate action. For Japan, therefore, American economic sanctions were so crippling that they regarded it as an act of war even though the Americans did not.
Furthermore, even morally speaking, sanctions are one government threatening people not to engage in commerce with another government. If I threatened all the food stores into your town and frightened them into not selling any food to you, you’d be perfectly justified in regarding that as an attempt on your life. By the same logic, the actions of the US government in prohibiting Americans from doing business with Japan were undercutting a vital interest of the Japanese government by threats of violence. It was more damaging to their war effort in China than killing thousands of Japanese soldiers a month would have been.
In addition, you’re overlooking the wider context of the Pacific War by your narrow focus on “interests”. By any measure, attacking the Union during the American Civil War was in the “national interest” of the UK, since they could see the writing on the wall that if the US became too powerful they would eventually supplant Britain as the most powerful country in the world. However, this possibility was remote and indeed it didn’t happen. The reason is that relations between the US and the UK were simply too good for any British government to be able to make that decision, and it’s likely that the government itself didn’t consider it seriously for the same reason.
With Japan, the situation was different. Japan had experienced a long period of racism and discrimination in the international stage. Japanese immigrants were treated poorly abroad and Japan’s demands for equality between countries were ignored. When after the end of WW1 Japan proposed putting a racial equality clause to the Charter of the League of Nations as the price for handing occupied German concessions on the Chinese mainland back to China, the Entente would not consent to it.
As the final insult here, in negotiations between Japan and the US to resolve the conflict in China peacefully, Japan offered to recognize the Open Door policy in China and withdraw its troops to the antebellum boundaries if this policy were recognized throughout the world: that is, if the US and the UK stopped their actions to keep out Japanese exports from India and South America, Japan would reciprocate and withdraw from China. Of course, this was rejected. The message Japan got from this episode is that it’s fine for the US and the UK to intimidate other countries into closing off their markets to foreign imports, but not fine for Japan to do the same. It’s exactly how Russia and China now feel about Ukraine: why is it fine for the US to invade Iraq but not fine for Russia to invade Ukraine?
I don’t want to write a whole history of the Pacific War here. I’m only trying to say that total war between Japan and the US was only made possible against a backdrop of decades of mistreatment of the Japanese by Western countries. I’m concerned about history repeating itself precisely because people don’t seem to recognize this and continue thinking in terms which would only lead to the situation getting worse.
I did say that I don’t know the relative size and it likely depends on many details, but what I can say is treating Russia as an enemy is what caused the current situation—not the invasion of Ukraine, but the general poor relations between Russia and Western countries. It created the backdrop against which these narrow interest and game-theoretic calculations start making sense. Nobody thinks that way about relations between Canada and the US, because the countries are simply too friendly with each other for this to ever come up.
If you want something that can be done right now and on short notice, making Ukraine a country with a similar international status to Austria or Finland during the Cold War would be one immediate solution.
However, if my way of thinking had prevailed this war would never have happened to begin with. Either the Russians would not have seen NATO as a hostile military alliance or NATO would have refrained from sending lethal arms to Ukraine and stationing thousands of foreign military advisors in Ukrainian territory after Maidan. These are provocative actions that make Russia feel threatened and ratchet up tensions between the US and Russia.
Russia bears just as much, if not more, blame for this process—I don’t want to exonerate them from blame in any way. The same was true of Japan in the Pacific War. However, if one side in these disputes had refused to play the game of ratcheting up tensions, the eventual wars would simply not have happened. In this context it takes two to dance.
I find this a bit difficult to take seriously. The WW2 in the Pacific didn’t start with well-treatment of China and other countries by Japan, either. Naturally Japanese didn’t care about that part of the story, but hey had plenty of other options how they could have responded their the UK or the US trade policy instead of invading Manchuria.
This is not a simple task, but rather a tall order. Austria was “made neutral” after it was occupied. Finland signed a peace treaty that put it into effectively similar position. Why would any country submit to such a deal voluntarily? The answer is, they often don’t. Finland didn’t receive significant assistance from the Allies in 1939, yet they decided to defend themselves against the USSR anyway when Stalin attacked.
Sure, but the game theoretic implication is that this kind of strategy favors the first party to take the first step and say “I have an army and a map where this neighboring country belongs to us”.
What a weird way to present the causality of events. I am quite confident NATO didn’t have time to send any weapons and certainly not thousands of advisors between Maidan and the war starting. Yanukovich fled 22 February. Antimaidan protests started in Donetsk 1 March and shooting war started in April.
I never said that it did. As I said, “in this context it takes two to dance”.
I don’t know why it’s hard for you to believe. In 1918, Fumimaro Konoe (then part of the Japanese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference) wrote an essay titled “Against a Pacifism Centered on England and America” in which he stated the following:
“Japan is limited in territory, poor in natural resources, and has a small population and thus a meager market for manufactured products. If England closed off its colonies, how would we be able to assure the nation’s secure survival? In such a case, the need to ensure its survival would compel Japan to attempt to overthrow the status quo as Germany did before the war.”
Konoe was Prime Minister for most of 1941, resigning in October only after his attempts to negotiate a last-minute settlement with the United States came to nothing. There’s no evidence to suggest he changed his mind, though in 1941 he opposed the war with the United States on pragmatic grounds since he believed Japan would lose.
The question is not about whether Japan could have done something different. Of course they could have. The question is whether decades of animosity contributed to the outbreak of war, and it’s clear the answer is affirmative here. Even the Japanese invasion of China is hard to imagine if Japan had been better treated by the United Kingdom and the United States.
Japan had two key concerns: physical and economic security. They felt their physical security was threatened because they faced two potentially hostile powers in China and the USSR. In the 1920s Japan had cooperated with Western countries within the framework of the Washington Order, in which China was to remain under an “open door policy” with respect to trade and all powers in the Pacific would cooperate to limit the size of their navies. This order, established when China was weak due to internal strife, caused resentment in China and the terms of this order prevented Japan from ensuring their security by striking China when they were weak, so it was quite reasonable for the Japanese to worry about the future.
If war with China or the USSR broke out in the depths of a depression, the US and the UK could have cut their losses and left Japan to fight alone in a ruinous total war. This, more than anything, Japan wished to avoid at all costs.
The concern about economic security is no less important, since the turn to protectionism all around the world following the Great Depression was exactly what Konoe had feared. Its effect on domestic politics in Japan was also pronounced. Since Japan is an island country that relies heavily on trade, the unilateral tariffs and quotas imposed by the US and the UK on Japanese exports right at the depth of the depression came at the worst possible time. This strengthened the hand of militarists who wished to construct the notorious “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere”.
All it takes is for NATO to stop selling weapons and sending military advisors into Ukraine. It has nothing to do with what Ukraine wants; if NATO says they won’t do it then the problem would be solved.
My whole point is that there are competing effects in this situation and not considering the resentment that a hostile policy will cause in Russia (or Japan) is a big mistake. I’m not denying that a more lenient policy has this effect, I’m saying it has an offsetting effect which could (and I think does, in the current case with Russia) lower the expected number of war deaths over the next 50 years, say.
How is that weird? NATO supports a movement of regime change in Ukraine. Russia sees it as an act against them and ratchets up tensions by taking over Crimea and supporting separatists in Donetsk & Luhansk. NATO sees it as an act of aggression and starts sending arms & military advisors to Ukraine. Russia sees this as a provocation and responds by full-scale invasion of the country.
I don’t understand what you find weird about this way to present the causality of events. Have I left something out or inaccurately represented anything that happened?
Another way to look at sanctions is that the government is helping coordinate many independent actors. I suspect that most of the people who have halted trading with Russia would have wanted to do so otherwise but would not have been able to because of market forces. The sanctions are the government’s way of saying “market forces are wrong here, all the independent actors can stop trading with Russia”, with the unfortunate side effect that some people are also being forced to not trade with Russia.
This is a purely hypothetical assumption, much like the theory of hypothetical consent as a justification for political authority. Needless to say, I’m not impressed with it.
It is true that in theory there is a coordination problem with sanctions because they are like taxes: the cost to a country of being sanctioned is second order in the magnitude of the sanctions being imposed. This means even an individual who cares about punishing Japan for its war in China can only impose second-order costs on Japan by his participation at the expense of a first-order cost to himself.
The problem is that there isn’t sufficient reason to believe in the real world that governments impose sanctions to solve coordination problems. Everyone can understand that Russian sanctions on foreign countries, such as blocking websites not cooperating with the Russian government or halting trade of various goods with European countries, are actually against the interests of individuals living in Russia. All I’m saying is that the same is true of most sanctions imposed by the United States government or any other government.