Sanctions Are a Hazardous, Malfunctioning Tool

If that tool also caused tremendous harm at the same time that it failed to do what it was meant to do, you would recognize that it was a menace and ought to be dismantled.

The Economist wins the award for understatement of the year:

It turns out the sanctions weapon has flaws.

The flaws of broad sanctions have been well-known for a long time, so it wasn’t as if it took imposing them on Russia to recognize their limitations and ineffectiveness. It was entirely foreseeable (and foreseen) that waging economic war on a country as large and powerful as Russia would have adverse consequences for the senders of the sanctions and for the entire world. We know from experience that targets of the harshest sanctions regimes also tend to be the most intransigent, and broad sanctions often backfire and produce more of what they are supposed to discourage. We also know that sanctions usually do not really “work” at all in the sense of changing the target’s behavior in the way that the senders want it to change. Given all that, it should not come as news that the “sanctions weapons has flaws.” The question should be why we continue to use a weapon as blunt and crude as sanctions at all.