On Sanctions, and Realism

One unexpected benefit of teaching a large lecture course in English to students who are overwhelmingly non native English speakers is that ambiguities in (my) English are noticed by them. So, for example, one student was confused by my use of 'sanction' a few weeks ago (in the context of a comment I made on Chinese political philosophy). For, 'sanction' has two standard meanings that are, in their valences, the opposite of each other: it can either mean something like 'official permission for an action' or it means 'a penalty for disobeying a rule.' And, after my exchange with one of my students I remembered a disagreement with a colleague a few years ago that turned on a mutual confusion in what sense the other was using 'sanction.'

As regular readers know, I thought last week that the call for expelling Russia from Swift would have largely symbolic effect. I did not anticipate that there would also be a (much more potent) central bank asset freeze. The jury is out on how effective these and related sanctions will be (a lot will turn on the details of enforcement and the way exceptions are allowed, as well as on Russian skill in patching together alternatives). One fears that by the time sanctions are enforced many oligarchs have moved assets out of reach. But what I did not foresee at all is that these sanctions would promote a classic bank-run, and that Russia risks a financial meltdown. In addition, it's quite clear that lots of other countries one could have expected to ignore these sanction have joined in, and that many important companies (in energy, microchips, and transportation), sports federations, and art organizations have been nudged into actions that effectively isolate Russia in financial and cultural ways.

Of course, sanctions are not the only source of pressure on Russia. There is an increasing supply of weapons being sent to Ukraine. Most of these weapons are defensive in character (anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft missiles), but there has been talk of some older fighter jets being shipped to  the Ukraine by the EU (this is important for EU's future). As long as the Polish-Ukrainian border is in hands of the Ukrainian government these kind of shipments may well reach Ukraine's defense forces in an effective manner. But, this kind of support tends to be limited, in practice (and mostly symbolic), because nobody wants to get entangled in a shooting war with Russia, which has a major Nuclear arsenal.  What may happen is that outsiders will support proxy wars (as they have done in lots of conflicts during the last few decades).

In general, sanctions tend to enrich the well-connected in the country being sanctioned because they tend to have new forms of rents and can gain in all kinds of ways from new forms of smuggling (through bribes and monopoly profits). They also tend to be a form of collective punishment on the rest of the population, who are thereby impoverished and for whom ordinary life becomes much more challenging (not the least because they will be asked for a lot more bribes), and so hard to justify. In general, they also tend to be not very effective if the goal is regime change or to induce changes of behavior. In fact, they tend to strengthen the repressive apparatus directly (or indirectly by providing an excuse for more repression) and to enrich it, and so seem self-undermining.

Before I get to my own view of the matter it is worth distinguishing conceptually three kinds of critics of sanctions because they come at it from different angles (even if these can overlap in practice and even if they embrace the claims in the previous paragraph). First, one kind of critic has a liberal sensitivity and thinks that isolation is a sure route to permanent conflict. This kind of 'liberal' can be the classical liberal who praises markets and soft-war power of culture, or the more Kantian liberal who likes internal treaties and organizations (there is, of course, partial overlap in these ideal types.)* They may even note that such a course of action will drive Russia into the hands of the (rather illiberal) Chinese government, which is thought undesirable for western interests or world peace (etc.). So, faced with Russia's invasion of Ukraine the liberal critic of sanctions and isolating Russia has to accept facts on the ground and/or support the mostly symbolic military assistance to Ukraine. 

In general my own sympathies are liberal and I often sign up for the kind of views expressed in the previous paragraph. But it is fair to say that such liberalism is unwilling to acknowledge that integrating Russia into the global order has been a failure if the goal was to pacify Russia after the collapse of its empire. In effect globalization has allowed Russia to enrich itself and thereby become more menacing to others. During the last few decades, Russia has been almost constantly at war. Several of the wars involved the reconquest and pacification of breakaway regions, but a few of them also involve(d) sovereign states, including Georgia and since 2014 Ukraine. So, the liberal who wants to double down on the path of mutual interdependence is revealing a touching faith in the light of cold facts. In a future post, I return to what liberalism can take away from this going forward.

The other kind of critic (who may also have liberal commitments) is a self-described realist. Such a realist will emphasize that Russia has legitimate security concerns and interest and these have been threatened by NATO expansion. And that, in fact, self-congratulatory sanctions in the past and the new ones in the present are themselves a cause of conflict (here's part of the overlap with some liberals). 

Now, as I hinted last week, I have some sympathy with the realist critique of Zelensky (who is otherwise hugely admirable and heroic). Once it became clear to Ukraine that NATO and EU were unwilling to help defend Ukraine (after 2014), despite the occasional and reckless lipservice to the contrary, he should have aggressively sought out other allies. And, in fact, it's pretty clear that Ukraine tried to develop Chinese support, and that this was torpedoed by Trump during his presidency (recall my link last week). What is puzzling is that there seems to have been little success and/or effort to return to the Chinese after Biden's victory or to interest Turkey and Israel into supporting Ukraine independence with military aid. And given how badly western countries have treated their nominal allies in Afghanistan and Iraq (Vietnam, etc.) it is puzzling why any state would count on them if they are not a member of Nato or covered by American nuclear deterrence. 

For, one oddity of the purportedly realist 'Putin/Russia has legitimate security concerns over Nato expansion' trope, is that the security concerns of Russia's neighbors are constantly belittled, discounted/ignored, and/or trivialized. This has two perverse effects: First, it privileges great power interests over the others. This is a feature not a bug of such purported realism, for such realists will probably say something like, ''it's only natural that great power interests matter more than other powers." What's odd about this (in realist terms) is that it fails to account for the efforts at balancing and coalition forming against great powers by smaller and other powers (which is what the realism that does not victim blame ordinarily suggests). This matters because the underlying logic of realist thinking requires such balancing/coalition forming and also requires a willingness by outsiders to balance and if necessary contest aggression on the battle-field.**

 

Second, because doctrines have effects in the world (they can be performative or be causes of actions), the doctrine that is biased toward great power interests over smaller power interests effectively legitimizes aggression by greater powers against the smaller powers while masking as an explanation. I don't mean this as a criticism of realism as such, only the realism that is not serious about the security interests of smaller fish. A lot of such realists are blabbering about 'Ukraine neutrality with security guarantees,' while ignoring that these guarantees have been worthless for the last few decades (and as was clear (recall) by 2014). Such realists tacitly assume that Russia is a status quo power rather than revisionary/revanchist. And these victim blaming pretend realists are really ignoring the facts of the last few decades. (That's compatible with the thought that liberal democracies have been irresponsible in all kinds of ways, including the speaking in split tongues and the unwillingness to help check Russian expansion as some realists should have urged.)

 

Some realists suggests that Ukraine should have pursued a neutrality course familiar from Sweden, Switzerland, Jordan, and Finland. All these countries had assets that Ukraine lacked (not the least non-trivial military capacity and willingness to fight) and had outside countries who had a clear stake in their continued existence as a buffer or neutral services. Ukraine's neutrality would have been more like Dutch neutrality at the start of WWII; nice if it's respected, useless otherwise. But again, it is pretty rich for people who call themselves 'realist' to suggest that Russia would have respected such neutrality given the evidence of the last few decades.

 

Again, I am not criticizing real realism here. I am critical of those who pursued their perceived interests (and so left Ukraine out to dry in return for Russian energy, legalized graft, and being a gateway for money laundering) in the name of realism without paying attention to the need to balance and check Russian power or to help Ukraine create its own security coalition. As it is, such purported realists seem to have no place for the heroic national defense by the Ukrainians of their homeland, and so in a way misunderstand the facts on the ground (even if Ukraine is successfully occupied or carved up, it is clear that the Russians cannot keep their hold on it without enormous costs downstream) . 

 

There is also a third kind of critic of sanctions, who worries that it is foreplay to Armageddon. This too comes in two kinds of flavors. First, there are those who worry it's possible that sanctions and military assistance to Ukraine lead to a kind of tit for tat escalation that turns this into WWIII and/or nuclear Armageddon. I think the risk of this is fairly low because Russia and the US have considerable experience in proxy warfare that they always manage to contain during the last few decades. The other worries that isolation and sanctions of Russia (alongside a drawn out conflict in Ukraine) lead to the implosion of Russia. This, in turn, can be a civil war, destabilizing of other countries, or, again, nuclear Armageddon (if Putin feels very threatened). I grant this is is uncharted territory and a real concern. 

 

So, let me wrap up. I personally hope and advocate that the sanction regime can be improved such that ordinary, individual Russians don't have to carry an enormous burden through it. So, with the more symbolic sanctions (say sports boycotts), I  think it's completely legitimate to boycott national teams (of Russia and Belorussia) and anything involving Gazprom sponsorship, but would urge a reconsideration for individual athletes (and artists, educators etc.) It would be good if face-saving mechanism to help de-escalate were developed, but these must also involve non-trivial roll-back of Russian expansion (and so I do not expect this to happen).

 

A policy of far-reaching sanctions that isolate Russia ought to be pursued in large part because the alternatives have so clearly failed, and because they do raise the cost of aggression (even at the expense of one's own economic welfare). It's the least bad of the existing options and can be expected to fall short of triggers that might lead to world war. It also buys time to wean oneself off energy dependence on Russia. A foreseeable effect of this is that Russia (with structural population decline and all the problems of imperial overreach) will become increasingly dependent on China (with whom it shares an enormous border and where it has strategic vulnerabilities). While the circumstances are very bad, this dependency would itself not be a bad outcome because (i) it can forestall Armageddon; (ii) and, while China, too, is a nationalist dictatorship which treats its own citizens shabbily and with design on some of its neighbors, it has repeatedly signaled its eagerness to play by global rules and it has shown far more restraint in pursuing its international aims. And in fact, China has more capacity to restrain Russia when the latter is a client state of it.*** Okay, let me stop here and explore the implications of the new political realities for liberalism, and its relationship to nationalism and federalism, in a future post.+ 

 

 

*Regular readers know I don't identify with either calling myself a 'skeptical liberal.' 

**In fact, the real problem with realist thinking is that it risks promoting open-ended war in the name of protecting interests and balancing others. 

***Some realist worry that pushing Russia into the hands of China in the context of great power rivalry between the US and China tips the balance of power toward China. But given Russian structural weakness, and some natural conflicts of interest between Russia and China, the opposite seems more likely.

+I thank Aris Trantidis and Stephen Davies for discussion on social media