What Is the Purpose of Economic War?

Every sanctions regime is plagued by the contradiction between the desire to compel a certain change in behavior and the desire to punish and harm.

Peter Beinart asks what the economic war on Russia is meant to achieve:

But what end goal are they designed to achieve? What would have to happen for Biden to lift them? I have no idea. I’ve read the statements the Biden administration issued when it removed Russia from the SWIFT financial network on February 26, when it banned the import of Russian oil on March 8, and when it asked Congress to ban imports of other Russian goods, like seafood, vodka and diamonds, on March 11. Those statements don’t answer this question at all. And it’s not just Biden. As the political scientists Erik Sand and Suzanne Freeman observed in a terrific recent essay, “No Western leader has announced conditions under which sanctions might end.”

The Biden administration and allied governments haven’t spelled out these conditions because I suspect that they still don’t know what conditions they want to set. Every sanctions regime is plagued by the contradiction between the desire to compel a certain change in behavior and the desire to punish and harm. If sanctions are seen by the target as simply punitive or aimed at forcing regime change, it becomes practically impossible to compel a change in behavior. That is one of the lessons of the destructive “maximum pressure” campaigns that have produced nothing but worse results and more severe humanitarian crises. Especially when a targeted government believes that what it is doing is important for its security and survival, intense economic warfare simply confirms the leadership in its belief that it must press ahead no matter what. That is how sanctions often end up encouraging more of the behavior that they are supposed to stop.