Why Long-Term Isolation Policies Don't Work

If isolating and weakening become ends in themselves, that likely leads to greater instability and insecurity for all parties.

Ivan Krastev makes a compelling case against the long-term isolation of Russia:

But any attempt to seal off Russia would be very different from the west’s cold war policy of containment of the Soviet Union. As George Kennan conceived it, containment was predicated on an assumption that over time the Soviet regime was destined to collapse because of its internal contradictions. A Chernobyl-style isolation would assume that Russia can never change.

As Krastev explains, trying to cut Russia off from the rest of the world plays into the Kremlin’s hands, it writes off the possibility of political change inside Russia, and it mistakenly assumes a degree of global unity in favor of the isolation policy that does not exist. I made a similar argument last week, and I noted that seeking to isolate and weaken a country will tend to backfire:

Policies of isolation and punishment typically provoke more undesirable and destructive behavior from the targeted state. They are obviously not conducive to making the government more accommodating and peaceful.