Name: Global powers need to take a crucial step before sanctions will work
Uploaded: 2022-03-02
Duration: 5 min 24 s
Description: Sanctions stand a better chance of working if they're enforced by multiple countries.

Sanctions stand a better chance of working if they're enforced by multiple countries.

Global powers need to take a crucial step before sanctions will work

Features

Countries need to take crucial step before sanctions work

if Russia goes further with this invasion, we stand prepared to go further. As with sanctions, sanctions are steps that governments take to interrupt the trade, the technology flows of other countries when they're trying to impose some principles or when there's been some form of wrongdoing, they can establish norms of international behavior, can seek to register opposition to acts of aggression or of nuclear proliferation or support for terrorism and the like. And they also become a vehicle that can sometimes spark a negotiation process for the United States to impose sanctions on another country requires a pretty elaborate political process. There is authority on the statute books that grants the president emergency authority to impose sanctions. So, to use the current example of Russia, all sanctions now involved the targeting of specific entities or individuals. So in this case, there has been the targeting of principal Russian banks and the various subsidiaries of their major financial institutions, and many of the leading political and economic figures. And we've also established secondary measures where the sanctions that were imposed have global applications so that if a state or a company wants to do business in the United States will be prohibited from doing so if they trade with a sanctioned entity, we're basically using the power of the dollar and of the american economy as a leverage to encourage other states to join us in imposing these measures of economic sanctions. If we think that sanctions by themselves will be sufficient to coerce a major power to change its behavior. Uh that rarely happens, on the other hand sanctions certainly signal international disapproval of particular actions, they helped to uphold a norm, a principle of international law. So under international law, it's a violation of law, it's a crime against the peace to invade another country. They can sometimes also cut off the supply of weapons and materials that are used for military action and for repression. This is a frequent pattern you see in sanctions where there'll be an arms embargo, so they will cut off the supply of weapons and that will affect also technologies or materials that could be used for weapons of mass destruction. There used to be the idea that you could just sort of put trade sanctions on the country and they would force their political leaders to make a change. But, you know, politics doesn't work that way, especially in authoritarian dictatorial regimes like Russia or Iran or North Korea. The leaders don't care pretty much what the people will experience sadly. So it's necessary than to target uh the top level institutions in the society, and especially to try to target the military capacity of those regimes for two purposes. One is just to limit the damage that they can cause, but also to really get at the core underpinning of their power in their societies, which is often their military power. And this points to another factor about sanctions, they're more likely to be effective when there are multilateral, if the U. S. Even as powerful as we are, if we just put sanctions on the country, they can always find someone else that can trade with and get what they need. Um But if they're multilateral through the U. N. In cooperation with the european states and with our allies in Asia as these sanctions are on Russia, then the prospects of success are much higher because they don't have anywhere anywhere else to go. You know? Yes, Russia can get microchips from china but it can't get high end microchips that are necessary to run their missile systems and they're accurate weapons programs. They may be able to run their washing machines or you know, their consumer electronics, but they're not going to enable the state to operate its sophisticated military sanctions are always going to have a humanitarian impact. The broader social impact. As in the current case with Russia, If you block all of their major banks, you block their access to their strategic reserve funds, that's going to affect the entire economy. Uh And you can begin to see already in Russia banks Are seeing a run on their currencies. The ruble has dropped to record lows. Interest rates have already jumped 10%. So that's going to affect the average person. And that's one of the big challenges. How can you impose measures that put pressure on the leadership without harming the average citizen. Those who impose the sanctions in this case of us, especially the european states, you have to be willing to pay a price yourself because you're losing trade. And with the case of Russia, it's a pretty lucrative trade. Can you really cut off the finance of the super wealthy and high tech sectors and the military sectors and allow for some basic trade to continue? That's the intention, and and we'll see in the coming weeks House That works out, mm hmm.