The Russian economy may have taken an initial hit when the new sanctions hit, but they’ve since recovered fully and are clearly doing just fine without the US. Turns out all the people who said sanctions don’t work, all they do is make it shittier for normal people living there were… yep, correct. As always. I’d like to think that after like 70 years of sanctions literally never working on an “adversary” (they did work on apartheid South Africa… the US’ ally. Odd ally btw. Wonder why the US keeps allying with apartheid states? Incredibly odd.) that people would stop advocating for, at “best”, starving normal people to death, but nope people are currently calling for more sanctions on Iran, another country that is getting by without the US and was recently directly instigated to war by Israel (but held back, thank god for Iranian restraint). Not as well as Russia, but still they remain. And we’ll never stop punishing them for not just letting us rule their country via proxy. Same as Russia.
But you know, in a way I’m almost for more sanctions. Not because they work or because these people “deserve” punishment (pretty sick fucking philosophy most Americans seem to hold, btw, while they chomp down their cheeseburgers and send more bombs to explode children) but because if we sanction more and more and more countries eventually they’re all just gonna be allied against the US. That’s the problem from a US perspective that they can’t seem to wrap their micro brains around. The US needs trade with the world and the world would like to trade with the US… but places and have and are able to get by without it. So keep self-isolating instead of doing actual diplomacy (start with removing the military and CIA from every country. Yes even ones “who ask us to be there.” If believe that, please DM me your drug dealer’s name. I wanna sample) and eventually when the US is totally isolated except probably Canadians who are cucked and probably western EU countries, although maybe not Germany, hard to say, maybe when the resources and commodities dry up or sky rocket in price, maybe those sanctions will finally work. Maybe the American people will finally “go out in the streets and demand change!” or whatever it is liberals are deluded into thinking.
Yo I don’t agree with sanctions either but to pretend that the massive military industrial isn’t propping up the Russian economy is absurd… any country’s economy tends to do well during wartime??? How am I spitting BS?
israel, for example, doesn’t seem to be doing super hot. Nor is ukraine, for obvious reasons.
The economic situation during wartime isn’t just inherently better and buoyed by war and destruction, but is often boosted by a wartime willingness to diverge from the capitalist economist orthodoxy and spent state money to keep production going. Russia also has a lot of domestic production and natural resources that are more resilient to sanctions-based attacks than say, high finance, tech industry, anything dependent on foreign capital, etc.
Whether that will change after the war ends depends on the same sorts of economic policies, though the contours will shift a little. The US after WW2 for example, didn’t collapse after the wartime economy went away. There’s a lot of reasons for that, and its not a perfect analogy, but still, they used economic tools at their disposal to keep the good economy going for a long time after the war.
You use a lot of thought terminating cliches to try and brute force your argument without actually presenting any argument. Like we are all supposed to just assume you are correct
Countries that are producing arms can do well, sure, no disagreeing there. But one of Russian’s main sources of wealth on the national level is oil which the US absolutely failed to sanction because Europeans, for obvious reasons, said “ok, we said sanction Russia, not commit suicide.”
But beyond oil, Russia has built up a resilience for decades now to US influence. Remember when the sanctions hit and all these corporations immediately had to leave to be in compliance. Russia just has their own McDonald’s (and a bunch of other examples). They have China on their border, a close ally of Russia and strong trade partner. Whatever resources or commodities the US sought to remove from the Russian economy they either had domestically produced replacements ready to go or China can fill the need if not.
Sanctions just simply do not work. If the US actually desired an end to the war in Ukraine it could’ve ended it two years and let Ukraine negotiate the eastern provinces to become independent as Putin has said since the start. Ukraine surely would’ve already done this had it not been for the US CIA and NATO pushing them with false promises of joining NATO (and a healthy far right wing in Ukraine with a gun to Zelenskyy’s head basically so he can’t ever give up or he’s gone- also supported snd strengthened by CIA).
Even in your own reply here you are saying the war is propping Russia up. I assume you think that is sustainable until the war is over and then Russia’s economy will collapse. Maybe. But that also indirectly concedes that sanctions are not working against Russia if it’s still able to wage effective war and maintain a stable domestic situations. The sanctions aren’t supposed to be “oh damn, well after the war is over, THEN the Russians will suffer and they’ll really regret that war!” They’re supposed to put pressure and force a faster end to conflict right now… which is objectively just not happening. Russia seems to have basically indefinite capacity to continue this war even with all the US’s harsh sanctions. The only thing further the US could even try (they already blew up that pipeline, remember that?) is really really forcing Europe to not buy oil sold via proxy which came from Russia. Is that gonna happen? Of course not because Germans aren’t going to destroy their own economy and their own standard of living all for the benefit of the US getting what it wants. And it’s debatable if cutting off all sales entirely would even work because again China can just keep buying all the excess. Unless China decides to start sanctioning Russia and stop purchasing their oil (never happening) Russia will be fine.
Anyway, sanctions work not if sanctioned countries struggle, but if they cave in to whatever the USA demands to lift them. Meaning you’d have to look at the countries who are not sanctioned to get an idea of how effective they are. Which is, admittedly, difficult to evaluate
There has never, never, been a single “adversarial” (which is usually a one-sided relationship to begin with, but leaving that aside…) nation that has caved to US demands due to sanctions from the US and its allies. Honestly if that’s incorrect, then please, find an example. I think I’m being fully reasonable here, so if I’m just wrong here then show me.
The best argument I can come up with against me here is if you’re talking about war situations. The US refused to trade with Nazi Germany after a certain point and same for imperial Japan, etc.
I would say the fundamental difference here is well, for one, those sanctions were meant to stop aggression by powerful states actively engaged in atrocities on a mass scale. So totally moral and just to place heavy pressure on them while also aiding allies already engaged in the war. Absolutely.
The difference between those sanctions and things like the embargo on Cuba or sanctions against Iran, Russia, etc. is now days we just place sanctions on states and step back, fold the arms, and say “ok, now watch them fail!” or cave to US demands which is just failing in every case to my knowledge. They want Cuba to totally eliminate, I dunno, all land reform initiatives and give the Cuban-Americans in Miami their plantations back. Or they want Iran to give the US corporations premium and full access to their oil. North Korea… well, no one even knows wtf they want from them. Just to torture then in perpetuity for embarrassing the superpower post-WWII still effectively at its height of military dominance into forcing a stalemate. That’s unforgivable I guess. Gotta just kill them all if we can.
The sanctions in the case of wars was “these are active enemies of the state, we will refuse them any trade they desire so we do aid in their war efforts against us or our allies.” Now it’s just “you refused to give into our demands 70 years ago, that made us big mad, and we will now make sure to the best of our ability that you don’t have commodities like those in the west have come to rely upon and associate (solely, oddly) with prosperity and success. Then we will point and laugh and call you a failed state… due to our own actions.” All this accomplishes is insulating “bad actors” (whom the US created most of the time) and giving them free propaganda “you don’t have nice TVs from Japan because the US tells them to deny us until we surrender! We won’t surrender!” or whatever the fuck. Literally just breeding resentment, and when you wipe away the lies and propaganda (sometimes based in truth but never with context) you have to ask “why are we sanctioning Iran?” as a relevant current question. You quickly discover, again if you wipe away western lies and racism, that Iran is sanctioned because we fucked around there, they kicked us out, and that made us fucking angry. Us being our capitalist and political class. Now days yeah people talk about women’s rights (btw, abortion was eliminated as a right in the US recently… hmm) and LGBTQ rights (yeah… again, US should probably not speak about that) or their “anti-Israel” stance which is basically just anti-US and anti-imperialism generally. Israel is the instigator in that region and placing any of that blame on Iran is just comical. This doesn’t mean I like the government of Iran, but that government is there for a very simple reason: the United States (and Britain, etc.) fucking around in the Middle East. So why the fuck are we sanctioning them? Those sanctions aren’t working, clearly. John Bolton has been edging to the idea of nuking Tehran for like 50 years. The sanctions aren’t doing anything except increasing (rightful) hatred for Americans/Israelis, etc., helping the theocracy dig in deeper, and ensuring that Iran will remain this isolated state in perpetual poverty cut off from much trade due to US sanctions.
So you’re wrong for two reasons: you’re arguing that sanctions of this kind on Iran, Russia, etc. might work or have worked and two for the moral reasoning since it seems like you’re sort of justifying their existence to begin with which is gross to me. If sanctions DID work any human with a heart would still oppose them when the reasons are those such as the US employs their sanctions. What right does the US have to unilaterally demand these countries do whatever? That’s what the UN is for.
And btw here at the end I remembered that the US placed genocidal levels of sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s after their invasion into Kuwait (which is a whole other discussion around Saddam being a US asset against Iran for a long time + HW Bush giving sort of a half-assed “I might look the other way, Saddam…” before the invasion and them immediately flipping into full blown “Wow, he did this, wow, wtf Saddam, wow”…) that resulted in a decline in their country from a previously, you know, they had electricity in Baghdad and enough food to eat for sure. Thanks to the US people were starving to death. And yet Saddam remained in power. His cult of popularity remained until the US invaded and eventually had him executed. Did the sanctions break his rule? Did they achieve literally any pressure at all? This was a state that, no joke, the US was totally crippling and nothing happened to the government there. I don’t see how one could argue these sanctions achieve anything beyond suffering. And supporting them is just supporting death and misery for the sake of it. There is no justice, no rationale, it’s just “yeah, those people are bad and deserve to die because they won’t overthrow their evil government! (Meanwhile, American government carries out so many genocides no one can fucking count anymore. But our people are innocent and cannot be blamed!)”
“Tbh” (immediately spills bullshit)
The Russian economy may have taken an initial hit when the new sanctions hit, but they’ve since recovered fully and are clearly doing just fine without the US. Turns out all the people who said sanctions don’t work, all they do is make it shittier for normal people living there were… yep, correct. As always. I’d like to think that after like 70 years of sanctions literally never working on an “adversary” (they did work on apartheid South Africa… the US’ ally. Odd ally btw. Wonder why the US keeps allying with apartheid states? Incredibly odd.) that people would stop advocating for, at “best”, starving normal people to death, but nope people are currently calling for more sanctions on Iran, another country that is getting by without the US and was recently directly instigated to war by Israel (but held back, thank god for Iranian restraint). Not as well as Russia, but still they remain. And we’ll never stop punishing them for not just letting us rule their country via proxy. Same as Russia.
But you know, in a way I’m almost for more sanctions. Not because they work or because these people “deserve” punishment (pretty sick fucking philosophy most Americans seem to hold, btw, while they chomp down their cheeseburgers and send more bombs to explode children) but because if we sanction more and more and more countries eventually they’re all just gonna be allied against the US. That’s the problem from a US perspective that they can’t seem to wrap their micro brains around. The US needs trade with the world and the world would like to trade with the US… but places and have and are able to get by without it. So keep self-isolating instead of doing actual diplomacy (start with removing the military and CIA from every country. Yes even ones “who ask us to be there.” If believe that, please DM me your drug dealer’s name. I wanna sample) and eventually when the US is totally isolated except probably Canadians who are cucked and probably western EU countries, although maybe not Germany, hard to say, maybe when the resources and commodities dry up or sky rocket in price, maybe those sanctions will finally work. Maybe the American people will finally “go out in the streets and demand change!” or whatever it is liberals are deluded into thinking.
Yo I don’t agree with sanctions either but to pretend that the massive military industrial isn’t propping up the Russian economy is absurd… any country’s economy tends to do well during wartime??? How am I spitting BS?
I think that’s a big ol’ Citation Needed
https://forward.com/opinion/603124/israel-economy-iran-retaliation/
israel, for example, doesn’t seem to be doing super hot. Nor is ukraine, for obvious reasons.
The economic situation during wartime isn’t just inherently better and buoyed by war and destruction, but is often boosted by a wartime willingness to diverge from the capitalist economist orthodoxy and spent state money to keep production going. Russia also has a lot of domestic production and natural resources that are more resilient to sanctions-based attacks than say, high finance, tech industry, anything dependent on foreign capital, etc.
Whether that will change after the war ends depends on the same sorts of economic policies, though the contours will shift a little. The US after WW2 for example, didn’t collapse after the wartime economy went away. There’s a lot of reasons for that, and its not a perfect analogy, but still, they used economic tools at their disposal to keep the good economy going for a long time after the war.
Bruh if this was true then the secret to economic growth would be breaking windows
“Tbh” “let’s not pretend”
You use a lot of thought terminating cliches to try and brute force your argument without actually presenting any argument. Like we are all supposed to just assume you are correct
Countries that are producing arms can do well, sure, no disagreeing there. But one of Russian’s main sources of wealth on the national level is oil which the US absolutely failed to sanction because Europeans, for obvious reasons, said “ok, we said sanction Russia, not commit suicide.”
But beyond oil, Russia has built up a resilience for decades now to US influence. Remember when the sanctions hit and all these corporations immediately had to leave to be in compliance. Russia just has their own McDonald’s (and a bunch of other examples). They have China on their border, a close ally of Russia and strong trade partner. Whatever resources or commodities the US sought to remove from the Russian economy they either had domestically produced replacements ready to go or China can fill the need if not.
Sanctions just simply do not work. If the US actually desired an end to the war in Ukraine it could’ve ended it two years and let Ukraine negotiate the eastern provinces to become independent as Putin has said since the start. Ukraine surely would’ve already done this had it not been for the US CIA and NATO pushing them with false promises of joining NATO (and a healthy far right wing in Ukraine with a gun to Zelenskyy’s head basically so he can’t ever give up or he’s gone- also supported snd strengthened by CIA).
Even in your own reply here you are saying the war is propping Russia up. I assume you think that is sustainable until the war is over and then Russia’s economy will collapse. Maybe. But that also indirectly concedes that sanctions are not working against Russia if it’s still able to wage effective war and maintain a stable domestic situations. The sanctions aren’t supposed to be “oh damn, well after the war is over, THEN the Russians will suffer and they’ll really regret that war!” They’re supposed to put pressure and force a faster end to conflict right now… which is objectively just not happening. Russia seems to have basically indefinite capacity to continue this war even with all the US’s harsh sanctions. The only thing further the US could even try (they already blew up that pipeline, remember that?) is really really forcing Europe to not buy oil sold via proxy which came from Russia. Is that gonna happen? Of course not because Germans aren’t going to destroy their own economy and their own standard of living all for the benefit of the US getting what it wants. And it’s debatable if cutting off all sales entirely would even work because again China can just keep buying all the excess. Unless China decides to start sanctioning Russia and stop purchasing their oil (never happening) Russia will be fine.
Obviously NK, Cuba, and Iran are striving…
Anyway, sanctions work not if sanctioned countries struggle, but if they cave in to whatever the USA demands to lift them. Meaning you’d have to look at the countries who are not sanctioned to get an idea of how effective they are. Which is, admittedly, difficult to evaluate
There has never, never, been a single “adversarial” (which is usually a one-sided relationship to begin with, but leaving that aside…) nation that has caved to US demands due to sanctions from the US and its allies. Honestly if that’s incorrect, then please, find an example. I think I’m being fully reasonable here, so if I’m just wrong here then show me.
The best argument I can come up with against me here is if you’re talking about war situations. The US refused to trade with Nazi Germany after a certain point and same for imperial Japan, etc.
I would say the fundamental difference here is well, for one, those sanctions were meant to stop aggression by powerful states actively engaged in atrocities on a mass scale. So totally moral and just to place heavy pressure on them while also aiding allies already engaged in the war. Absolutely.
The difference between those sanctions and things like the embargo on Cuba or sanctions against Iran, Russia, etc. is now days we just place sanctions on states and step back, fold the arms, and say “ok, now watch them fail!” or cave to US demands which is just failing in every case to my knowledge. They want Cuba to totally eliminate, I dunno, all land reform initiatives and give the Cuban-Americans in Miami their plantations back. Or they want Iran to give the US corporations premium and full access to their oil. North Korea… well, no one even knows wtf they want from them. Just to torture then in perpetuity for embarrassing the superpower post-WWII still effectively at its height of military dominance into forcing a stalemate. That’s unforgivable I guess. Gotta just kill them all if we can.
The sanctions in the case of wars was “these are active enemies of the state, we will refuse them any trade they desire so we do aid in their war efforts against us or our allies.” Now it’s just “you refused to give into our demands 70 years ago, that made us big mad, and we will now make sure to the best of our ability that you don’t have commodities like those in the west have come to rely upon and associate (solely, oddly) with prosperity and success. Then we will point and laugh and call you a failed state… due to our own actions.” All this accomplishes is insulating “bad actors” (whom the US created most of the time) and giving them free propaganda “you don’t have nice TVs from Japan because the US tells them to deny us until we surrender! We won’t surrender!” or whatever the fuck. Literally just breeding resentment, and when you wipe away the lies and propaganda (sometimes based in truth but never with context) you have to ask “why are we sanctioning Iran?” as a relevant current question. You quickly discover, again if you wipe away western lies and racism, that Iran is sanctioned because we fucked around there, they kicked us out, and that made us fucking angry. Us being our capitalist and political class. Now days yeah people talk about women’s rights (btw, abortion was eliminated as a right in the US recently… hmm) and LGBTQ rights (yeah… again, US should probably not speak about that) or their “anti-Israel” stance which is basically just anti-US and anti-imperialism generally. Israel is the instigator in that region and placing any of that blame on Iran is just comical. This doesn’t mean I like the government of Iran, but that government is there for a very simple reason: the United States (and Britain, etc.) fucking around in the Middle East. So why the fuck are we sanctioning them? Those sanctions aren’t working, clearly. John Bolton has been edging to the idea of nuking Tehran for like 50 years. The sanctions aren’t doing anything except increasing (rightful) hatred for Americans/Israelis, etc., helping the theocracy dig in deeper, and ensuring that Iran will remain this isolated state in perpetual poverty cut off from much trade due to US sanctions.
So you’re wrong for two reasons: you’re arguing that sanctions of this kind on Iran, Russia, etc. might work or have worked and two for the moral reasoning since it seems like you’re sort of justifying their existence to begin with which is gross to me. If sanctions DID work any human with a heart would still oppose them when the reasons are those such as the US employs their sanctions. What right does the US have to unilaterally demand these countries do whatever? That’s what the UN is for.
And btw here at the end I remembered that the US placed genocidal levels of sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s after their invasion into Kuwait (which is a whole other discussion around Saddam being a US asset against Iran for a long time + HW Bush giving sort of a half-assed “I might look the other way, Saddam…” before the invasion and them immediately flipping into full blown “Wow, he did this, wow, wtf Saddam, wow”…) that resulted in a decline in their country from a previously, you know, they had electricity in Baghdad and enough food to eat for sure. Thanks to the US people were starving to death. And yet Saddam remained in power. His cult of popularity remained until the US invaded and eventually had him executed. Did the sanctions break his rule? Did they achieve literally any pressure at all? This was a state that, no joke, the US was totally crippling and nothing happened to the government there. I don’t see how one could argue these sanctions achieve anything beyond suffering. And supporting them is just supporting death and misery for the sake of it. There is no justice, no rationale, it’s just “yeah, those people are bad and deserve to die because they won’t overthrow their evil government! (Meanwhile, American government carries out so many genocides no one can fucking count anymore. But our people are innocent and cannot be blamed!)”