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Friday, March 04, 2022

David Edgerton, for Guardian, writes an analysis of sanctions - worth reading.

 Link. For Crabgrass readers disinclined to read the entire thing, this excerpt, which might motivate some to seek out the entire original - concluding paragraphs -

Sanctions are seen as alternative to war, more readily voted for. But they are aggressive actions, and are like wars in that they are costly affairs. Effective sanctions require serious economic and political intelligence, the capacity and willingness to act against evasions and to bear the cost they impose on the imposer. Sanctions are, like war, a matter of alliances. In the second world war, the United Nations dominated the world economy, to an extent that today’s Nato/EU cannot match. Interdicting the Spanish merchant marine during the second world war was a very different matter from bringing China into anti-Russia sanctions today. On the other hand today Russia has an economy smaller than Italy’s.

How effective sanctions could be in crippling an economy like the Russian one remains to be seen. After all, it is much easier to affect financial instruments than the real economy, and trade is not everything for a country as geographically large as Russia. As was found during the second world war sanctions don’t simply take a chunk out of an economy, they force it to change, to emphasise self-sufficiency. Sanctions force states into internal transformation and repression. They also lead to counter sanctions, and to military threats. Thus Germany, a very much larger economy than Russia, is not only imposing sanctions, but preparing to diversify its energy supply, and to nearly double its defence budget, which would make it very much larger than Russia’s. Putin’s crime is thus not just a matter of attempting to take over Ukraine, but turning the world once more into one with surging military expenditure and warring political economic blocs.

But we also need to look at the political logics that may play out. While there is a possibility that these events will boost the standing of western militarists, those who would have us continue to engage in permanent war, another possibility is there. For who are the enemies this time? They are neither communists nor Islamists nor Arab nationalists. They are white nationalists, producers of fossil fuels, kleptocrats, near climate denialists, critics of what they call gender ideology and practiced and fluent liars. It is not just Putin who should be scared, but all the mini-Putins he has inspired, in power in London, Brasília, Budapest, Warsaw and Riyadh, and recently in Washington. This has the potential not only of turning into a global campaign against fossil fuels and kleptocratic tax havens, but might arouse the wrath of the woke against the neofascist international of our time. But we must beware, for the liberal internationalist drive to sanctions and to war, usually illegal, has already blighted the lives of millions in the 21st century. We should remember that war itself is a crime, not merely the site of potential war crimes.

So well written that an extended quote was justified. Read it all.