SANCTIONS - UKRAINE

21 July 2022

<<If sanctions worked, it would be a victory over Russian boots ("une victoire à la Pyrrhus", cruel joke.)>>

We enter the sixth month of the war. Russia has taken a quarter of Ukraine and its most valuable industrial part and continues to advance militarily for the time being at least. The West has imposed the toughest sanctions imaginable, but Russia has escaped with ease, while the West appears trapped and discredited, and to have shot itself in the foot, the head and the stomach.

Sanctions are in place of war. It is war by economic means. The West does not approve of this "unprovoked invasion", but isn't willing to fight a nuclear power. The West (America and Europe, with popular - if "manufactured" support, despite great hardship) provides Ukraine with arms, training and money, but has sent in the locals to fight a superpower.

But are sanctions an effective alternative to war? What is their purpose? What does the historic record of sanctions teach us? Who pays the price? Are there any other ways of getting international law and human rights respected?

Action in the UN is blocked by the Russian veto, so war cannot be approved as it was in the case of Libya.

The aim of sanctions is to modify the behaviour of a regime. However, in this case the Russian people appear to strongly support their leadership and there is no Gorbachev figure around to ease a transition. Gorbachev dropped Russia's ally Iraq to permit the 1991 Iraq war.

Cuba, Venezuela. Sanctions did not top all the Communist leadership and despite the harshest of blocades, Fidel Castro died in his bed.

Iraq. From 1991 the date of the first invasion to 2003 sanctions caused the deaths of half a million Iraqis but it took an invasion by the West to topple Saddam Hussein.

Syria. The west plus the Arab League imposed sanctions after a failed sunny uprising in 2011 but the Shia are still running the country, with assistance from Russia and Iran.

Iran. Iran was the most sanctioned country in the world before Russia invaded Ukraine. 

-Sanctions were first imposed in 1979 after revolutionary students stormed the US embassy and were lifted in 1981 when the hostages were released. 

-Sanctions were reimposed in 1987 after years of Iranian harassment of Gulf shipping and other alleged acts of terrorism. 

-The sanctions were expanded in 1995 

-and a third set were imposed in 2006 when Iran refused a UN resolution to stop uranium enrichment. 

-The sanctions started in the petrochemical industry, then expanded to banking and insurance, then shipping and then the web where Iran was denied DNS access. 

-Then in 2015, there was the JCPA deal, that was cancelled by Trump in 2018 and sanctions were reimposed. 

-In February 2020, Iran was placed on the FATF Blacklist.

All this to say that the Iranian theocracy is still going strong and has just held a meeting in Tehran with Turkish and Russian leaders, presumably on the sanctions and how to take advantage of them.

South Africa. Here the sanctions worked a white minority government handed over power to a representative government in the face of universal condemnation of apartheid. This cases not like those above because the world United against an apartheid regime.

Israel. An apartheid regime with a vision of hegemony from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean, that has escaped sanctions due to a powerful Jewish-US lobby and a history of pogroms and the Holocaust.

So looking at the overall history of sanctions and their effectiveness, we could ask why, if sanctions have not been effective against small and medium-sized countries, then how could we expect a large and economically and militarily important country like Russia, led by shrewd and experienced president, to fold? Did the West really think this through? Did the reference frame include Brexit, Covid, the debt crisis and rising inflation, the Middle East, Taiwan, de-globalisation. Were the lessons of previous interventions really learnt? Was this belligerent and conflictual attitude to problem-solving ever re-evaluated?

Because what sanctions appear to have achieved is to have weakened and split the world economy and the world powers. Sanctions are really a story of a dominating power imposing its will on the dominated or slave or student power - something that worked well for a couple of hundred years. But now, the third world or the South doesn't like or appreciate this and do not approve of the Western narrative, seeing it as colonial and disrespectful, and they are now in a position to express themselves.

Perhaps the reason why Europe and America impose sanctions on Russia is that, well,  what else could we do? But the problem is this has exposed our impotence and isolation. Sanctions have failed to modify Putin's behaviour on the country he has found ways around Western sanctions and is building relationships, that may or may not endure, with the South. This at a time when China can be expected in this decade to make its first moves towards Taiwan.

So it seems that the mistake was that the sanctions were designed in America, approved in Europe and imposed on the South. We should not be asking the South to sign at the bottom of the page on the right, but we should be discussing and persuading and negotiating.

So this article should not be taken as an anti Western rant. Not at all. But it does question the attitude and the methods. It follows the principles of the West, it wants the West to be respected and followed, but this article recognises that this method employed of imposing rules has failed because we in the West no longer have a monopoly of power so to keep our leadership and our room for manoeuvre we must operate by persuasion by example and by conviction, not by imposition.