America's Invisible Graveyard

Last week the U.S. and its allies enacted sanctions which should for all intents and purposes be understood as a war crime. From a purely consequentialist/humanitarian perspective sanctions are totally unjustifiable. They will impoverish millions of people not only in Russia but the many countries which are economically reliant on and integrated with the Russian economy. Impoverishing millions in effect means killing tens of thousands.  

This is from Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs's 2019 paper "Sanctions as Collective Punishment.”

I have not looked into their methodology, and the 40,000 number may be wildly inflated. However, that its even plausible that U.S. sanctions could cause 40,000 deaths in Venezuela over the course of one year speaks to the disastrous humanitarian consequences American sanctions can have.

Of course, it will not only be the Russian people who suffer. Central Asian nations are reliant on Russian remittances which have now become worthless, that is if foreign workers can even get their money out of Russia at all. The sanctions will also almost certainly cause massive disruptions to grain markets. Although the sanctions don't specifically target Russia's food exports, they will limit Russia’s ability to trade on global markets. The price of foodstuffs is already soaring, in part due to the actual invasion, but also largely due to the sanctions placed on Russia. I am not particularly knowledgeable on this subject, but I thinks it's safe to assume that this will cause tens of thousands of excesses deaths in MENA if not outright famine.    

What I find particularly galling however is that there is not even a semi coherent rational for what sanctions are supposed to accomplish. The simple fact is that sanctions won’t topple regimes we don’t like. You can read the Poli-sci literature on this topic, which is quite robust. Basically toppling a bad regime is a collective action problem. Impoverishing the country in question doesn’t solve this fundamental problem. This fact should be self-evident just based off the recent history of Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia (2014), etc.

The few times sanctions can work is when they have limited objectives, or when they are used to deter an action before it happens. It is notable that U.S./EU sanctions have in no way been structured to do this. Prior to Russia's invasion the U.S./EU signaled that they would be unwilling to impose harsh measures such as cutting Russian banks off from SWIFT. If the U.S./EU wanted to achieve deterrence they should have publicly committed to these sanctions prior to the invasion. Once the war started, sanctions (if implemented at all) should have been structured specifically to encourage de-escalation with stated off ramps for Russia if they met certain conditions. Instead, the sanctions seem to be focused on the destruction of the Russian economy, a morally unjustifiable goal. Will destroying Russia's economy hurt their war effort? Perhaps on the margin, but the economic destruction also necessitates that Putin achieve his maximalist political goals in order to justify the cost. 

Some are justifying sanctions from a strategic perspective arguing they work to signal to potential aggressor nations that national sovereignty must be respected. This is of course laughable. I unironically consider myself a patriotic American, but the notion that the U.S. cares about respecting sovereignty is ludicrous considering the last sixty years of American military adventurism. What’s more, the U.S. has done almost nothing to punish other nations who have violated national sovereignty. Recent violations of national sovereignty including the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Israel’s seizure of the Golan Heights, Morrocco’s annexation of Western Sahara and Turkey’s annexation of parts of Northern Syria, have drawn limited sanctions or none at all.

What those arguing for sanctions as a signal are really saying is that it will deter powerful countries the U.S. doesn't like, namely China from invading Taiwan. This argument however assumes some fantasy reality in which the U.S. has the ability to cut China out of the global economy through sanctions. China is the world’s largest exporter and is at the center of almost every important global supply chain. Enacting crippling sanctions against Russia will not scare China, because China correctly understands that it is too powerful an economic force to be bullied out of the global economy.

The ability to deter China invading Taiwan is dependent on actual economic and military strength, not the willingness to signal convincingly. In this respect sanctions will in fact weaken the U.S.'s economic deterrence by increasing Russian dependence on the Chinese while also threatening the U.S. dollar's central role as the global reserve currency.

To summarize:

-Sanctions are a humanitarian catastrophe (essentially collective punishment)

- Were not structured to deter Russia or to deescalate the conflict and will have at best an ambiguous effect on the actual war 

-  Weaken America's strategic position relative to China  

Why is no one opposing this? Where is the outrage? We are digging the world's largest invisible graveyard out of a self-centered desire to "do something".