Sanctions Haven't Stopped Russia, but Biden Claims Even More Will This Time
As you may have noticed during these last interminable 110 weeks, Joe Biden is big on appearances.
He’ll fly his battalion-sized entourage all the way to some Heartland city just to get a bridge in the background as he proclaims the advantages of his trillion-dollar economic plans and skips over the actual costs.
And he still gets himself back within the secure enclosure of the Washington Beltway for dinner.
Biden’s not the only chief executive to embrace empty photo ops. Alright, it’s actually the unidentified “they’s” who tell him what to do, who are the most passionate about appearances.
Thus, we were treated in recent days to video of Presidents Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky strolling the streets of Ukraine’s war-torn capital to mark the Russian invasion’s first anniversary. Great visuals.
What we didn’t see were the armed guards off-camera and Biden’s handlers alerting Russian officials in advance to the U.S. president’s visit and asking them to refrain from bombing the city while the elderly American leader was there.
Air-raid sirens were set off anyway, however, to add a little faux audio drama to the TV soundtracks. The visual giveaway was no one running for cover.
Russia has more than triple the population of Ukraine in 49 times the land area. The fact that its invasion forces have not only been stymied but pushed back by the out-gunned underdog is a pretty convincing sign that Texas-sized Ukraine is willing to fight for its independence.
That status came after the Soviet Union’s collapse. It was guaranteed by Russia and others some 30 years ago in return for surrendering its nuclear weapons stockpile.
(Russia’s unprovoked invasion is another lesson in diplomatic deceit as learned by Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi. He also gave up his nuclear weapons program in return for security guarantees. Those guarantees lasted just nine years until European countries and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama decided he needed ousting by force. A Libyan mob took care of the rest.)
The pièce de résistance of Biden’s Ukraine foray was the ensuing announcement of even more economic sanctions on Russia and Russians to be layered atop a 12-month stream of sanctions on Russia and Russians that have punctuated news cycles throughout the entire year since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine anticipating a cakewalk.
Given that strongmen with armies are not given to saying “Oops!”, we can only guess if sanctions might have worked before an invasion.
The West put sanctions on Putin in 2008, when he annexed two provinces of Georgia, and again in 2014, when he seized Crimea from Ukraine and fomented insurgencies in eastern Ukraine.
Those sanctions changed nothing, although Putin did pause his land grabs during the presidency of the less predictable Donald Trump.
With all those sanctions already in place, we must be down to sanctioning Putin’s driver and gardeners by now.
In three words, here’s something else you may have noticed: Sanctions don’t work.
Bidenites and sympathetic U.S. media will eagerly point out that sanctions and seizures have seriously damaged the Russian economy. As best we can tell, it actually shrunk in the past quarter.
About 1,000 Western companies have packed up their engineers, their gear, their expertise, licenses, and patents and left the country, along with a quarter-million well-trained Russian engineers, scientists, and experts adverse to combat.
It will take decades, if ever, to rebuild that economic and intellectual infrastructure.
So what?
The point of sanctions is not to cause economic damage. It’s to force the target to change its undesirable behavior ASAP. Parents are familiar with sanctions, only in families they’re called groundings, withheld allowances, loss of laptop privileges.
After an entire year of allegedly escalating U.S. and Western sanctions, there has been no change whatsoever in Putin’s behavior or the war crimes committed by his poorly-trained military and Wagner’s band of merry mercenaries.
Wagner “soldiers” were serving prison terms for robbery and killing civilians. Now, they can earn their freedom by killing Ukrainians, if they survive six months of assaults, which many haven’t. But prison costs are down.
Putin just called up another 300,000 warm bodies to throw Stalin-style into the line of Ukrainian live fire. Iran, North Korea, and maybe China and others are shipping munitions and weapons for Russia to pock Ukraine’s countryside and kill more defenders.
Putin gave a speech to Russia last week. He’s changed his tune since the invasion in a couple of important ways.
Originally, he said his so-called “special military operation” was necessary to rout neo-Nazis next door among a Ukrainian population that would welcome Russian troops as liberators.
However, the number of coffins under construction and the fresh graves in cemeteries across Russia make that less than convincing, indicating Moscow’s military encountered a somewhat different kind of welcome in Ukraine.
Putin now, for the first time, describes the fighting as what it is, an actual war.
He says it is being fomented and fueled by evil Western forces working to undermine Mother Russia. He also appears to be setting the scene for a long, bloody struggle without, of course, admitting that he started it.
The ex-KGB colonel describes Western economic sanctions as nothing other than the West undermining the homeland in another way. And there’s no indication that Putin will accept anything other than “victory,” however that comes to be defined at some future time.
Sanctions sound great and, when described for the cameras with an emphatic finger jab, can appear great. But let’s look at sanctions’ recent record here.
Joe Biden’s been on the government dole his entire adult life. So, he has little understanding of markets.
His initial leadership of a boycott of Russian oil actually jacked the global price of oil, pouring additional billions into Putin’s wartime treasury. Turns out, a lot of folks are ready to buy Russian oil, including China and our old friend India.
Barack Obama sanctioned Syria when it began ruthlessly crushing a civilian revolt, even canceling the credit cards of Bashar al-Assad’s Western wife. Nothing’s changed there.
North Korea’s been under international economic and political sanctions for decades. Famines occur there with citizens at times forced to graze on grass.
But the latest ruling member of the Kim dynasty gets all the champagne he needs in his six residences along with the Western delicacies he came to crave during his private school days in Switzerland.
Kim’s ICBM tests stopped during the Trump presidency. The Republican refused to lift sanctions until a verifiable nuclear weapons deal was done. The tests have resumed since Biden’s arrival.
Joe Biden lifted some long-running sanctions on Iran and Iranians as a sign of good faith to encourage resumption of nuclear talks. They took the Democrat’s offerings but didn’t bite.
And Iran continues as the world’s largest exporter of terrorism. A recent shipload of Iranian arms for Yemen was intercepted by the U.S. and the weapons redirected to Ukrainian fighters.
Remember when Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro was subverting his country’s elections and suppressing civilian protests six years ago? Trump imposed an array of sanctions on companies, banks, and Maduro associates.
Nothing changed there either. Several million refugees fled to neighboring countries.
Biden lifted some of those sanctions because he needs to buy Venezuelan oil since his early restrictions on domestic oil and gas production smothered U.S. energy independence. That left American drivers once again at the greedy mercies of the OPEC cartel.
Last week’s new round of sanctions on Russia and Russians was described as harsh, making one wonder what all the others were, and why these weren’t imposed earlier.
The new U.S. sanctions were aimed at more than 200 additional people and entities like banks and companies, which boosted the roster of sanctioned above 2,000, touching defense, tech, mining, and metals industries.
“The United States,” said Treasury Secy. Janet Yellen, “will stand by Ukraine for as long as it takes.”
Truth is, standing by Ukraine also benefits the United States and NATO. At stunning costs in lives and property, Ukraine and its people are willingly and seriously depleting Russia’s once-vaunted military at no cost in lives and property to the U.S. and its allies.
The allies would be instantly involved together if a Putin success in Ukraine encouraged him to invade elsewhere in Europe.
The idea is to stop Putin now and create a bloody, upset defeat next door as the enduring legacy of Vlad, the would-be conqueror, not some gloriously restored Russian empire.
But as excited as media gets over them each time, the new sanctions and their predecessors will not decide anything.
Post a Comment