They impose a collective punishment, over people who have no influence on the policies for which they are sanctioned.
Pointer from Mark Thoma. There is more at the link.
My view of economic sanctions is that they are an act of war. If you are not willing to declare war against another country, then my presumption is that economic sanctions are morally wrong.
Assume for the sake of argument you’re right that sanctions are an act of war. Using nuclear weapons is certainly an act of war. Do you think that it is immoral to go to war if we are not prepared to use nuclear weapons against the enemy?
Finding nothing else in life sacred, libertarians sacralize economy activity.
Why are we doing these economic sanctions. I don’t even know to what this story refers, but I’ll bet it has a lot to do with our “economic interests.” Let me guess, though, it has something to do with the Middle East. I think liberals are pretty silly for claiming that the cabal is trying to steal the oil. But Republicans are dumb if they think we care about the Middle East because of anything other than oil and a little Israel sprinkled in. But I wonder how much we’d care about Israel if it weren’t for (1) oil and (2) the mistake of putting Israel in Palestine.
So, I skimmed the piece and it is somewhat about Russia. Or, In other words, yeah, Oil. What am I supposed see as sacred? I don’t.
You seem to be assuming that somebody (who – the US? Britain?) made the mistake of “putting” the polity now known as “Israel” where it is. Where do you think “Israel” should have been put? In the 1890s, Uganda was considered by the Zionist movement as an alternative to the land renamed “Palestine” by the Romans in the second century (after the Philistines, a by-then long vanished, probably non-Semitic people mentioned in the Hebrew Bible). Herzl in fact proposed Uganda, and it was resoundingly rejected by the movement membership. Do you think having “Israel” in Uganda would be preferable to the current situation?
Preventing a disgusting and dangerous entity like the Iranian despotism from getting nuclear weapons would seem a goal worth imposing economic sanctions to attain, even without the factors of oil and Israel. But the West apparently has decided that it no longer cares about stopping nuclear proliferation. Just as it seems no longer to care about the long-run survival of its own civilization.
No, I’m not assuming that. But it’s also somewhat true.
First off, you have scoured the internet and found the place where you can have a conversation and don’t need to troll it.
“Preventing a disgusting and dangerous entity like the Iranian despotism from getting nuclear weapons would seem a goal worth imposing economic sanctions to attain”
Maybe, but that’s not why. Most entities with nukes are disgusting and dangerous. And that’s not really why “we” oppose their nuclear aspirations. And our methods aren’t really effective. The reason people don’t want Iran to have nukes is they don’t want the regional balance of power to shift and hurt our economic interests. “We” don’t really care about the real threat which is rogue nukes.
The US stopped Taiwan and also stopped South Korea from getting the bomb.
Why?
Well, in Taiwan’s case, there would have been a 30 second “use it or lose it” time window if you thought there was a Chinese strike heading to Taiwan.
We very much have prevented proliferation even for allies, because its dangerous all by itself.
What Arnold wrote: “If you are not willing to declare war against another country, then my presumption is that economic sanctions are morally wrong.”
What you appear to think he wrote: “If you are not willing to impose economic sanctions on another country, then my presumption is that war is morally wrong.”
I think Arnold’s implication is that if you are not willing to start shooting, economic sanctions are morally wrong. Perhaps I misinterpreted him, but his emphasis on whether or not we are willing to “declare war” is odd, given that we haven’t “declared war” against any other country since 1941.
That’s why Arnold’s point is NOT odd.
To me, what a country does seems more significant than whatever it “declares” it is doing. Thus, I don’t see the significance of the presence or absence of a declaration of war. This is not an endorsement of unilateral presidential wars not authorized by Congress in any way, and certainly not of wars that serve no useful purpose at all (i.e., Libya).
If you aren’t willing to declare war, then you shouldn’t do war. There are a lot of reasons, one of which is because it is the law. That shouldn’t be controversial, even though we don’t debate it anymore and just attack people without declaring war. One reason that the principle was formalized I suspect is because it was recognized that rulers love capricious warring. That is why the power was vested in Congress. The reason they get away with abdication of this responsibility is that so far all these undeclared wars don’t mean anything. But let a potential war actually matter and then people will suddenly care a lot.
Arnold thinks sanctions are an act of war and a form of attack. He didn’t say that you had to do war over materialism and could attack over something sacred, just that attacking someone’s material is an attack. So, if you don’t think wars should be ad hoc and capricious, and you think that economic sanctions are an attack, then it makes perfect sense. If whatever you are holding sacred is so sacred, maybe you should be willing to do more than something you assume doesn’t matter all that much. You don’t have to agree.
The way our constitutional system has evolved (at least before Obama’s idiotic and unilateral Libya adventure), Congress authorized sustained military actions (as in Korea, Vietnam and the two wars against Iraq) without actually declaring war. That is probably inconsistent with the original intention of the Constitution, but at least the president did not unilaterally get us into wars without congressional involvement (again, apart from Libya, which Congress never authorized in any way). Maybe we should not have gone this road, but we have. In the context of the way the war-decision system has functioned in the US since the Truman administration, Arnold’s emphasis on the presence or absence of a formal declaration of war is misplaced. Sanctions are always implemented pursuant to some statute or other, and thus are authorized by Congress.
Suppose Russia invades the Balkans or China invades Taiwan, and sanctions are off the table, what then? Is it either A) WWIII or B) A sternly worded resolution deploring blah, blah, blah followed by business as usual?
Perhaps it depends on your view of trade. The underlying assumption supporting sanctions seems to be that trade is supportive of a regime. Perhaps trade can also be subversive. Maybe it depends on the nature of the trade and the regime. Personally, I find it odd that we just sell weapons and military technology just about anywhere.
North Koreans seem so brainwashed that maybe sanctions don’t work at all, if the objective is to make the population mad at the leader.
North Korea is a special case. But even there, I think the consensus is that the Chinese would have leverage if they ever decided to use it.
I don’t have any problem with people who view economic sanctions as an act of war since it’s a very common-sensical assessment of the real impacts of the policy. Under that view, it’s possible to argue that the allies declared economic war on Japan long before Pearl Harbor.
However that is not how things are characterized under the current system of International Law. To paraphrase Rumsfeld, “You go to war with the IL you have, not the IL you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
Firstly, even severe economic measures are usually distinguished from armed conflict as a formal matter.
And second, the subjects of one sovereign have no natural or transcendental right to trade with the subjects of another sovereign. Not a very Libertarian way of looking at things, but that’s how it is. The sovereigns may agree by treaty or custom to extend these privileges to their own and each others subjects, but they are deemed to have always reserved the right to condition or revoke that license at will or in the event of certain special circumstances, understanding that they may face reciprocal and harsh consequences short of armed conflict as a result.
Anyway, what really is the Libertarian answer here?
Let’s say Abe is the only butcher in town, and Bob pisses him off. Abe says “I’m not selling to you any longer.” Bob can still get meat, but now he’s got to go out of his way and make a special trip to the next town and pay higher prices to get it.
That harms Bob involuntarily, but it also harms Abe voluntarily since he loses a sale. But we usually say that Abe has no affirmative duty to trade with Bob if he doesn’t want to, and that Bob has no actionable claim against Abe. Tough luck Bob, maybe you should have thought twice about staying on Abe’s good side.
International Law says that Abe and Bob can be nation states and the same holds. They can sign trade treaties, but they can also withdraw from them without it usually being some kind of casus belli.
But even if refusing to trade were a causus belli, would it be morally wrong to impose such a sanction without intending or desiring to get into a shooting war? Arnold seems to be answering this question, “yes.” I do not follow his reasoning on this point.
The reason we get together with other countries and impose sanctions is to avoid repercussions to us, not to limit damage to the target nation.
I’m not sure to which comment you intend that to respond, but it is not responsive to my 11:10 comment.
In any event, you are correct that sanctions are not imposed for the good of the target country (although I assume those who supported sanctions against South Africa thought they would ultimately help nonwhite South Africans by bringing down the apartheid regime). However, sanctions are a way of opposing the target regime that does less damage to the target country’s population (and to the targeting country’s military personnel) than, say, dropping bombs. When we do bomb other countries, we’re generally not doing it for the benefit of the population of the target country, but we do try to do it so as to limit civilian casualties.
Yeah. It is, because you and many others keep conflating the law, which is basically arbitrary, with the economics, which is what Arnold is talking about.
We just don’t care what international law is…for economics purposes. It’s irrelevant to the point being made. In fact, the more countries agree on the sanctions, that is mainly to maximize the damage to the target country.
And at a certain point, the damage approaches that which would be exacted by a shooting war. And that’s why it can be equivalent to an act of war. And it’s not entirely clear that attacking the regime directly would cause more damage to the population than sanctions do, unless you assume that sanctions are rather impotent.
Governments don’t refuse to trade. They punish people for trading. If it is “an act of war” then I’m not sure it would be “morally” wrong to do it while not wanting to a shooting war as much as it might be ignorant.
You are basically making the assumption that it’s not an act of war (or at least not as bellicose as direct military action- although who intercepts the boats?) and that it is effective, and that “we” are deciding to not trade (as opposed to the government deciding to punish foreign and domestic traders). We can disagree about those.
You can also declare war and then not initiate total war. We just lately choose to do it the other way around, attack lots of people and not declare war. You aren’t understanding Arnold’s semantics and that is part of the cause of the misunderstanding.
“My view of economic sanctions is that they are an act of war. If you are not willing to declare war against another country, then my presumption is that economic sanctions are morally wrong.”
I agree that economic sanctions are hostile, but it’s a little crazy to think that there can’t be disputes that, whether for moral or practical reasons, justify economic sanctions but not dropping bombs. As harmful as economic sanctions can be, they are typically going to be less deadly than traditional warfare.
Very well put. This was the point I was less successfully trying to make above.
It seems to me you made your point fine but we are having trouble making ours.
“it’s a little crazy to think that there can’t be disputes that, whether for moral or practical reasons, justify economic sanctions but not dropping bombs. ”
Why? All it takes is thinking they can be roughly equivalent.
The underlying assumption of the pro-sanctions faction is that sanctions aren’t that big a deal compared to shooting. Well, the anti-sanctions faction questions that, and we’d also like to point out that sanctions may escalate the conflict towards shooting and trade opens channels. My guess is the pro-sanctions faction is just as empirically bare as the anti-sanctions faction.
So the sanctions, such as those we’re now lifting against Iran, are the “rough equivalent” of the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo. Got it.
Wow. No. And neither is firebombing the equivalent of nuking as you suggest in your original comment.
You really are determined not to understand our point.
Oh, so now you’re withdrawing the equivalence argument. Apparently, you’re just making a prudential argument, that sanctions are unlikely to work and make war more likely. I disagree, but I can see that if I believed in your version of reality, your rigid anti-sanctions position would make sense.
If we were talking about starving countries into submission – like the total blockades enforced against occupied Europe during WWII, or the siege of Leningrad – I could see how one might consider sanctions “roughly equivalent” to firebombing. But the sort of sanctions the West uses today are nothing like that. We do not stop countries from importing food, etc.
It doesn’t take thinking that they “can be” roughly equivalent. It takes thinking that they “must be” roughly equivalent.
And that’s just not the case at all. Just as there are situations that would justify military acts without justifying nuclear bombs, there are situations that would justify economic sanctions without justifying military actions.
If Arnold’s point is that democratic nations requiring a formal declaration of war imposing economic sanctions or taking military action typically will result in better government, that could possibly be correct. I’m not sure that supports a presumption that sanctions without a declaration of war are morally wrong, but I guess it could depending on how weak the presumption is.
Are drone strikes equivalent to dropping bombs?
Do we know economic sanctions aren’t worse than bomb dropping, btw?
I’m not sure exactly what Arnold means by “morally” but I mean that if you assume sanctions are less damaging than other acts of war that should take place under declaration of war, you could be wrong.
Yes economic sanctions could be worse than bomb dropping, depending on the sanctions and the bombing campaign. But that doesn’t mean that it’s logical to say that sanctions should only be imposed when you are willing to declare war.
Even when you are comparing dropping bombs and sanctions that functionally have the same effect, it’s not clear that sanctions and a traditional act of war are the same. Consider a situation where we are in a dispute with Mexico and Mexico receives 15% of say, its electricity from the US. The U.S. could just refuse to sell that 15%, allowing Mexico to deal with the resulting market impacts, or the US could drop a bomb on the transmission infrastructure in Mexico used to transport the electricity purchased from the US. It seems to me like refusing to sell electricity is significantly different than blowing up transmission structure that prevents Mexico from purchsing electricity. In either way, Mexico loses 15% of its electricity supply overnight, but I think it’s reasonable to determine that the dropping bombs scenario bears a much higher standard of proof than the refusing to sell situation.
Milanovic’s first paragraph is a little wrongheaded. Sanctions have nothing to do with schadenfreude. Think of it like this: aid is used by rich countries to buy policy concessions from poorer ones. Sanctions coerce policy concessions.
I agree with his remarks about collective punishment, though. Still, I think the questions we need to be asking ourselves are “are these sanctions likely to obtain us the concessions we desire?” and “do we value these concessions more than we value the average targeted country’s citizens’ access to imported food/medicine?” rather than conceptual questions like “are sanctions an act of war?” or what have you.
Generally, contemporary sanctions (such as those imposed on Iraq between the two Gulf wars) exclude food and medicine.
Imagine a line in the sand called “declared war.” There is another line labeled “war.” Where do you put sanctions, shooting, bombs, nukes, etc. with respect to these lines?
Under both international and domestic law, the US need not declare war to use military force, so why would it need to declare war to use economic countermeasures or sanctions?
Anyway, “sanctions hurt innocent people and are dumb” is probably the consensus position among legal scholars. Scholars that do support sanctions want them to make an effort to target elites more than the polity. But no one argues they are the same thing as using force, under international law they are governed by different articles of the un charter (41 and 42) and under domestic law they implicate different powers of congress.
I am no expert but I would expect that economic sanctions, by reducing the power of markets, increase the discretionary power of Government and its ability to exploit the underground economy. It will make the people poorer but the politicians wealthier. How does this punish the leaders? It is the exact opposite.
The purpose of sanctions is not usually to bring down the regime. It is to get the regime to change its behavior in some particular way (e.g., to withdraw from an invaded country, or to stop engaging in ostensible nuclear arms development).
I agree that imposing sanctions in the hope of changing a country’s regime is misguided, but the only example of that comes to mind is the sanctions program against South Africa, which was so universally supported that it worked.
I suppose it could be argued that it was hoped that the sanctions against Cuba would help to bring down the Castro regime, but I think their purpose originally was to punish the regime for its expropriation of American property.
Sanctions can also be as simple as a signal.
This is why they now start out small, and targeted and escalate.
If all wars could be fought economically, the world would be a better place.
Haha, the liberal contingent chimes in!
I mean, we owe everything we have to trade, but fugget it, money is evil!