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 Sanctions can escalate the war

The Western world lacks strategic goals and risks repeating Putin's mistakes

Of:

Trita Parsi

PUBLISHED: TODAY 14.55

This is a cultural article that is part of Aftonbladet's opinion journalism.

An exchange office in Moscow shows the exchange rate of dollars and euros at the beginning of the

 war.

 An exchange office in Moscow shows the exchange rate of dollars and euros at the beginning of the war.

Photo: Pavel Golovkin / AP

CULTURE

After three weeks of Russia's illegal offensive war against Ukraine, it is clear that Vladimir Putin has made a mistake. The Ukrainian defense proved to be significantly stronger than he expected, the Russian-speaking minorities in eastern Ukraine did not greet the invaders with flowers (as little as any Middle Easterners have ever welcomed American invading forces with presents and applause) and the Western response to Putin's war became harder, faster and more unanimous than even the Western leaders themselves had thought.

However, Putin's big misjudgment - for which he now has to pay the price - risks being repeated by the Western world. Namely, you invest everything you have in a sanctions strategy without either agreed goals or direct solutions, and without any deeper insight that sanctions have a tendency to escalate conflicts rather than resolve them.

The sanctions from the West have made a big impression and hit rock hard, it is obvious. Until a couple of weeks ago, Iran was the world's most sanctioned country, an unenviable position that it took years of controversy to reach. But in five days, Russia managed to overtake Iran and is now the planet's most severely sanctioned country.

. The important thing when assessing their usefulness is not how much pain they do, but whether the pain leads to a political change of course.

Never before has there been such a rapid and thorough move - from cutting Russia off from the Swift system to imposing sanctions on the Russian central bank and freezing Russian assets worth billions of dollars - into an economic war against a nuclear power (or for that matter a non- nuclear power). And, of course, there is no doubt that Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine deserved a scathing response.

But in the euphoria that prevails that Europe and the United States finally think the same way again - with an EU that can smooth over its internal contradictions and for once feel united, and a NATO that has regained its raison d'être - the agreement on tactics and approaches has replaced a sober thinking about strategy and goal fulfillment.

No matter how impressively fast and united the West has behaved, one should remember that it is the easy part. Of course, the sanctions will be economically viable for Russia. But the important thing when assessing their usefulness is not how much pain they do, but whether the pain leads to a political change of course.

And here somewhere, the West seems to have disregarded partly what is usually the case with sanctions purely historically, and partly the inherent tendency of the sanction tool to drive development in the direction of more war, not less. As Nicholas Mulder of Cornell University writes in his new book on sanctions: "The history of sanctions is mostly a story of various disappointments."

Neither Europe nor the United States is looking for a war with Russia. President Joe Biden has been crystal clear on that point: the United States intends to absolutely defend every inch of NATO territory, but it does not intend to go to war against a nuclear-armed Russia for Ukraine's sake.

So far, Biden has wisely rejected the introduction of no-fly zones, as well as other measures that would significantly risk bringing the United States closer to a nuclear war. The focus on sanctions depends in large part on the unwillingness to start a war - and that is exactly what may prove to be the Western world's own equivalent of Putin's miscalculation.

Political scientists David Lektzian and Christopher Sprecher have reviewed the statistics - all cases where countries have been sanctioned and all cases of armed conflict between nation states, from 1948 to 1998 - and concluded that sanctions increase the likelihood of resorting to violence. Historically, there has been a sharp increase in the risk of military violence following the imposition of sanctions.Such an escalation on Putin's part is exactly what Lektzian and Sprecher are warning us about. In a situation of renewed Russian aggression, it would be politically very difficult for Biden and the EU countries to back down. It is more likely that the West would respond with an escalation - and so it continues.

There are two other factors that make sanctions more suitable as a punishment than as a means of pressure.

Firstly, if we start with the United States, it is not easy to know how much one dares to trust a sitting president's promises that sanctions will be lifted. The country is so divided politically. It is unlikely that a future president would feel bound by previous commitments; on the contrary, in some situations it may be tempting to break completely with the foreign policy pursued by the representative.

So Trump chose to handle a number of the international commitments made by Barack Obama, including the nuclear deal with Iran. It is something that still haunts those negotiations today, because Biden has still not succeeded in convincing Tehran that the Republican Party will never again sabotage an agreement in that way. In fact, several leading Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, have already promised to halt such an agreement should they win the 2024 presidential election.

Secondly - and this applies even if the sanctions were lifted - one does not escape either the goodwill damage to the companies doing business in Russia, or the concern in general that a peace can become fragile. Therefore, many international companies will stay away from the Russian market in the foreseeable future. Putin is, of course, aware of this. It may make him even less inclined to settle for a diplomatic solution and instead make him escalate the conflict.

If these two factors are not addressed, tensions between the West and Russia may begin to follow the pattern of the US-Japan confrontation in the 1940s.

Enda the only economic relief available was through military escalation.

In 1939, the Americans thought best about how to respond to Japan's policy of aggression in Asia. Many in the foreign service were afraid that an oil embargo would only lead to increased tensions and that the Japanese would respond with a military takeover of the Dutch East Indies. But when Japanese forces invaded French Indochina, the proponents of sanctions emerged victorious from the debate. In July 1941, the Roosevelt administration froze Japanese assets, and a month later imposed a total gas and oil embargo. After only a few months under these sanctions, the Japanese oil reserves were running out.

The sanctions put the Japanese in an increasingly desperate situation, where they soon came to the conclusion that the only economic relief available was through military escalation.

Five days before Pearl Harbor, Japan's ambassador to the United States issued a warning to the host country: if the blockade continued, Japan would "rather fight than give in to pressure". On December 7, 350 Japanese fighter jets attacked Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans. Instead of leading to peace, sanctions helped drive a war. Perhaps most frightening of all is that the Japanese decision-makers chose to attack the United States completely contrary to their own intelligence, which unequivocally showed that a war was hopeless.

The earlier the war ends, the lower the risk that the conflict will escalate into a nuclear war, the less the Ukrainian people need to suffer and the greater the chance that there will be lasting peace. None of this is likely to become a reality if the current sanctions are not linked to a clearly formulated, jointly developed diplomatic strategy. If that does not happen, then Putin will have to make the same choice as the Japanese in 1941.

With that difference, of course, that he, unlike Emperor Hirohito, is sitting on nuclear weapons.

Trita Parsi is a political scientist and vice president of the Quincy Institute in Washington DC.