Doc7505
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- Feb 16, 2016
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Have sanctions against Russia boomeranged?
Have sanctions against Russia boomeranged?
Sanctions historically have produced unintended and undesirable consequences, yet they have become the policy tool of choice for the United States.
thehill.com
Western leaders are beginning to recognize, if not openly acknowledge, that their unprecedented sanctions against Moscow are hurting their own countries’ economies without significantly crimping the Kremlin’s war machine.
The fallout from the U.S.-led sanctions on Russia has ended the era of cheap oil and gas and contributed to surging inflation, supply-chain disruptions and a looming recession in the West. In poorer countries, by sending fuel and food prices higher, the sanctions are threatening livelihoods and political stability.
As the West is now discovering, sanctions against a large, powerful state not only entail significant costs for the countries imposing them, but they also reward nations that refuse to enforce them. Indeed, the sanctions have delivered Russia a windfall from high-price energy exports that no Western-sponsored price cap can significantly roll back.
Claims that “Russia is losing” and that “Putin is running out of options to avoid defeat” have given way to open concern that, despite the unparalleled sanctions on Moscow and the frenzied arming of Ukraine, Russia will end up gaining permanent control over sizable Ukrainian territories, thereby unambiguously demonstrating that aggression works.
Western leaders clearly overestimated their capacity to undermine the Russian economy and Putin’s hold on power, while underestimating the resilience of a country that historically has endured extraordinary economic and human toll (including in World War II) to pursue strategic objectives.
With European gas prices already six times higher than a year ago, a possible Russian cutoff of gas supplies to punish the EU for sanctions will compound the already-grim European economic situation.
Meanwhile, spiraling international food prices are contributing to an alarming hunger problem in poor countries. But worse in global impact is the sanctions-linked disruption in supplies of fertilizers and wheat from the world’s No. 1 exporter of both, Russia.
~Snip~
This is redolent of how America’s 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, by substantially raising import duties and prompting other countries to retaliate, deepened the Great Depression and contributed to the rise of political extremism, which then enabled Adolf Hitler to gain power. The risk now is that, instead of the wished-for economic collapse and regime change in Russia, the Western sanctions campaign could transform global geopolitics by provoking a Russian nationalist backlash and cementing the Sino-Russian axis.
Commentary:
What are the odds that every one of Joe Biden's actions during 2021 have led up to the boomeranging of Sanctions against Putin's Russia?
Indeed, Biden and his Maoist Democrat handlers have created one clusterfuck after another throughout the year in a half of his tenor, both domestically and in Foreign Relations. Whether that has been total incompetence or intent is open to discussion.
Certainly, Biden's have driven America to the point of what everyone is calling a Repression when all I see is a Economic Depression greater than the decade of the 1930's depression more than 90 years ago.
Joey has summed it up in one word.