Conquer Club

The Brazilian President has today condemned the USA's 'illegal' economic blockade of Cuba:

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ ... 023-09-16/

The UN General Assembly is due to begin sitting over the next few days, as part of which it is expected to have its annual vote on a motion condemning the USA's economic warfare, a motion which almost every country in the world (except the US and Israel) supports each time it is raised.

The economic blockade of Cuba has not worked for over 60 years. The only thing that this blockade has done is hurt ordinary Cuban families.

Ditto blockades of Iran, North Korea etc. Sanctions never achieve their stated goals, and there's no way presidents can't know that by now.

Pack Rat wrote:The economic blockade of Cuba has not worked for over 60 years. The only thing that this blockade has done is hurt ordinary Cuban families.

bigtoughralf wrote:Ditto blockades of Iran, North Korea etc. Sanctions never achieve their stated goals, and there's no way presidents can't know that by now.

Yup, pretty much.

These sanctions are mainly for domestic propaganda value. "Look how much those fuckers over there are suffering because they didn't listen to us!"

bigtoughralf wrote:Ditto blockades of Iran, North Korea etc. Sanctions never achieve their stated goals, and there's no way presidents can't know that by now.

This is like saying “laws and jail don’t work because people still commit crimes”.

There are plenty of times where sanctions or the threat of sanctions have worked.

There are also plenty of times where sanctions have failed to produce desired results.

The problem is one of perception. The simple truth is that the times where they’ve worked are less newsworthy and easily forgotten, whereas the times where they fail seem to be more numerous because they last longer and drag on-and-on-and-on.

The US led “West” have only a handful of tools available to encourage or coerce bad actors (i.e. foreign governments) to become good global citizens. These tools include both carrots and sticks. If you don’t like the mild stick of economic sanctions, then the next available option is military intervention; which presumably you’d like even less.

The whole “never achieve their stated goals” is just a crock.

https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/casestudy/hug01/

I guess we should just start selling all our best technology to China, because “sanctions NEVER work”.

Idiots.

jimboston wrote:There are plenty of times where sanctions or the threat of sanctions have worked.

Times sanctions haven't worked:

• 60 years of sanctions against Cuba
• 70 years of sanctions against North Korea
• 40 years of sanctions against Iran
• Sanctions against Russia since Ukraine war started
• 3-4 years of sanctions against Japan prior to Pearl Harbour
• etc

Times sanctions have worked:

• Plenty of times

The US led “West” have only a handful of tools available to encourage or coerce bad actors (i.e. foreign governments) to become good global citizens.

Oh I see, you think you live in an old spaghetti Western.

1) You didn’t bother clicking on the link provided.

2) Not all sanctions involve severely restricting most trade… some are targeted at a specific industry or technology.
Do you think we (the West) should trade our most sophisticated chip technologies with China?

3) Just because a bad regime is able to last even under US led or other Western sanctions does not mean they are “not effective”. They may not cause the regime to collapse or reform always… but they often still have positive effects. How far along with North Korean missile technology be if there were no sanctions? How far along would Iranian nuclear technology be without sanctions? It’s not a binary question.

Furthermore the effects of sanctions on those economies are a useful lesson to other countries. They demonstrate the carrot end of the equation; and encourage countries to be good global citizens to avoid sanctions.

… but keep viewing it as a binary issue, as that’s all you seem able to process.

Obviously sanctions can fail or backfire or lose potency over time and if overused. I’m not claiming “all sanctions are great”. I’m simply pointing out that anyone who says “sanctions never work” is either a dolt or intentionally lying.

jimboston wrote:Furthermore the effects of sanctions on those economies are a useful lesson to other countries.

Remember when the Clinton Administration was responsible for that genocide? No no, not the 500,000 that they watched get butchered in Rwanda and did nothing. I meant the half a million Iraqi children that died as a result of embargoing medicines and baby formulas out of their possession.

jimboston wrote:1) You didn’t bother clicking on the link provided.

Is copy-pasting books with no explanation or summary now considered a valid argument? In that case:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2539368
https://www.hoover.org/research/why-eco ... -dont-work
https://jpit.uk/sanctions-dont-work-but ... ing-anyway
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/sanctions-a ... -very-well

I posted 4 links and you only posted 1, so currently I am correct.

If you reply telling me I'm wrong before you've read all of those articles top to bottom, you will be arrested.

2) Not all sanctions involve severely restricting most trade… some are targeted at a specific industry or technology.
Do you think we (the West) should trade our most sophisticated chip technologies with China?

Restricting exports of sensitive technology is not a sanction.

Maybe before you read the above links, start by familiarising yourself with the one below:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sanctions

Have you rethought your support for sanctions, or do you still support impoverishing families in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran etc in retaliation for actions they're not responsible for?

For what it's worth, I can see pros of sanctions as well. Since the US move on to sanctioning Chinese companies it has swung the machete so wide as to start cutting itself out of the world economy (e.g. banning Google apps from 20% of the world's smart phones). Ultimately this out-of-control sanctioning will lead the US to its stagnation and eventual implosion.

Maybe the Iranian villagers going without medicine can take comfort in knowing they are ultimately martyrs contributing to the collapse of the American Empire.

jimboston wrote:1) You didn’t bother clicking on the link provided.

I did.

jimboston wrote:Obviously sanctions can fail or backfire or lose potency over time and if overused. I’m not claiming “all sanctions are great”. I’m simply pointing out that anyone who says “sanctions never work” is either a dolt or intentionally lying.

Or it's a casual exaggeration, not meant to be taken literally, as is fairly common in conversation.

Obviously sanctions work once in a while. For casual conversation, saying they never work is close enough for hand grenades or horseshoes. It's not close enough if one is trying to publish a scholarly paper, but AFAIK nobody here is trying to.

I didn't spend hours on your article, but I did have a quick read and look at the charts. Some observations:

• Unilateral U.S. sanctions' success rate went from a high of 66% in the years 1945-1959 (a time when most of the world was still liking its wounds from WW2 and the U.S. had pretty overwhelming hegemony in the world) to a low of 8% in the years 1980-1989, with an overall success rate of 27%.
• The 'All cases' success rate went from 50% in the years 1914-1944 (counting some of the early successes of the League of Nations before its effectiveness faded) to a low of 26% in the years 1980-1989, with an overall success rate of 34%.
• As one might expect, the success rate is higher for the U.N./League of Nations scenarios than those where the U.S. goes alone, but both fail far more often than they succeed.
• The article is relatively short on concrete examples for the successes it counts. The only five that I found in it: Libya, Somalia, Serbia, Haiti, Iraq (pre-1990). All four of these were small, poor, already-isolated nations that had few friends in the world. One almost feels sorry for them. This seems to be the pattern -- sanctions will work against tiny nations that have few friends or resources. They will not work against big nations with many allies like Russia or China.
• If you go back to the list above, are any of them better off now than they were before their pariah governments were overthrown? I would say a resounding no. Libya and Haiti are undoubtedly worse. Somalia, Serbia and Iraq could be argued either way, but even if things have slightly improved for the survivors, the millions that died getting here give evidence that it wasn't worth the price. So this is where we end up: even if sanctions succeeded in their (limited) stated objectives, they failed in the larger sense that they did far more harm than good in the long run.

Looks like even jim didn't click his link.

Stated goals and actual goals are not always the same.

You all think there’s no deterrent effect?

Cutting off technology is a sanction.

Embargos, sanctions, boycotts, cancel culture, etc. All are varying aspects of the same thing. Everybody does it when they feel like it.
Whether it is truly 'non-violent', or just 'passive-aggressive' is another matter.
Even tariffs and some other taxes are the same. Instead of outright forbidding it, they just make it uneconomical.
Censorship and other bans are quite similar as well. Only with words/ideas instead of money and trade goods.

jimboston wrote:Stated goals and actual goals are not always the same.

You all think there’s no deterrent effect?

'Sanctions work in invisible ways that no one sees!'

The basic idea is that if the policies of Castro/Putin/whomever are detrimental to international trade and therefore the cause of economic strife, then the underclass might rise up and overthrow them. Of course, that is easier said than done in a totalitarian state (or any state)... but all revolutions have to start somewhere.