President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on March 1.
Photographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/Bloomberg/Bloomberg/EPA
By
Nick Wadhams
3 marzo 2022, 06:01 CET
Listen to this article
4:13
Share this article
Follow the authors
@nwadhams
+ Get alerts forNick Wadhams
The sanctions the U.S. and Europe are
slapping on Russia’s economy and the billionaires around President Vladimir Putin are unprecedented in scope. Some experts wonder if these powers have made clear what actually needs to happen to get those restrictions lifted.
With each day bringing new punishments—against Russia’s
central bank, the
airline sector, and
more—President Joe Biden’s focus has been on inflicting as much pain as possible and slowing
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The broad reach of the measures, and the coordination among the U.S. and other powers, has also demonstrated the international community’s united anger at the invasion of the sovereign country. But there’s concern that the administration isn’t thinking hard enough about how to bring the conflict to an end.
“If you want to use these sanctions as a tool to get him to do something, you have to tell him what to do, even if you don’t think he’s going to do it”
That’s spurring fears even among Biden supporters, because it suggests his team is committing some common mistakes when it comes to sanctions: imposing them as a purely punitive measure to assert U.S. disapproval rather than to push Putin into a certain behavior. Once the sanctions are turned on, they fret, they could be impossible to switch off unless Putin is overthrown.
“If you want to use these sanctions as a tool to get him to do something, you have to tell him what to do, even if you don’t think he’s going to do it,” says Jane Vaynman, an assistant professor of political science at Temple University who researches security cooperation among adversarial states. “What I’m not really seeing is even any articulation of it that way.”
In theory, it seems obvious that the first step would be for Putin to just turn the army around. But now that war has begun, the problems are more complex. Even if the Russians deescalated, what steps would they have to take to be trusted again? Are there face-saving measures for Putin short of full capitulation that the U.S. and its allies would accept? Would it be enough for the
oligarchs surrounding Putin simply to disavow him, or would they have to go further? The stakes of all these problems are heightened by Russia’s being a nuclear power.
While even some Republican officials have acknowledged that the sanctions have demonstrated toughness, the Biden team’s economic moves are starting to provoke a degree of unease that no one seems to be considering the long-term consequences, or how Putin might hit back rather than back down.
Average annual additions to sanctions list, by U.S. administration:
- G.W. Bush: 435
- Obama: 533
- Trump: 1,028
- Biden (first year in office): 765
Some of the sanctions’ power lies in their use as a threat, and the U.S. had earlier promised “swift and severe costs” if Russia invaded Ukraine. But in its rush to move decisively, Biden’s team risks looking past decades of evidence that smothering economic sanctions, absent other policy moves, may leave leaders entrenched while their own people suffer. History is littered with examples of regimes that hung on despite economic embargoes, such as those in Cuba, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela.
“We have escalated very quickly on the financial side in response to what was a very concerning escalation in military conduct, but Russia retains ability to escalate on the financial side as well,” says Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “We’ve gone from zero to 60 in no time, and I think we’re going to be dealing with the consequences, possibly for decades.”
The political popularity of the maximalist approach was on display during Biden’s
State of the Union speech, when he touted a plunge in the ruble and the Russian stock market losing 40% of its value. But he didn’t mention what the U.S. was doing to otherwise end the conflict. Given his refusal to commit U.S. troops, Biden suggested sanctions would be the main way the U.S. planned to check Putin. “The Russian economy is reeling, and Putin alone is the one to blame,” he said, before ad-libbing a dark warning: “He has no idea what’s coming.”
New measures could include sanctions on energy exports, a move that would deny Russia its most vital source of revenue. “I think people are trying to do more because the human cost of the status quo is so unacceptable,” says Jeffrey Schott, whose book
Economic Sanctions Reconsidered has become a classic text detailing the limits of sanctions as a policy tool. “There always is a risk that if you back a powerful autocrat into a corner he’s going to lash out.”
www.ilsole24ore.com
/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/ETTB65D77ZJH7FXSDTN3S3TSHQ.jpg)
www.reuters.com
