Book Review: Backfire
Soon after the first wave of sanctions against Russia were announced and companies began their exodus from the country, I wrote to the regional head of IELTS. I hoped to persuade him to continue hosting tests in the country. The IELTS facilitates the young and the ambitious to study and work abroad, I argued. These people are the natural enemies of a regime like Russia’s, not its allies: hurting them does nothing to stop the war.
In fact, instigating a brain drain would do more to harm the regime than would symbolic gestures that don’t work.
I received a polite reply but no action.
In Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests, Agathe Demarais argues that the moral and pragmatic justifications for sanctions are thin. In fact, she demonstrates through a nearly century-long review of diplomatic history that more often than not, US-led sanctions do not achieve their objectives and in many cases exacerbate the situation.
In the minority of cases where sanctions do appear to “work,” specific conditions need to be met:
In sum, typically effective sanctions are in place for the short term, have a narrow goal, target a democracy that has significant ties with the United States, and are backed by American allies. This is the exact opposite of most US sanctions programs.
The most severely sanctioned countries — Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela — each have anti-American regimes with remarkable longevity. In the case of Russia, the most serious effects of sanctions (an inflation spike in 2015) have already been integrated into its economic picture.
Further actions simply don’t — and can’t — have as much bite as those initial efforts.
Aside from their dubious effectiveness, sanctions raise moral and legal questions. Demarais writes:
If they are a weapon of US diplomacy, which looks increasingly likely given their central role in economic warfare, sanctions could contradict international law. Under the Geneva Convention, weapons must discriminate between civilians and combatants.
The purported logic of using sanctions as a weapon is to force civilian populations to put pressure on government authorities, perhaps even moving citizens to oust rogue leaders. This simply does not happen in authoritarian systems. There is no electoral consequence for the decision-makers: their rule is a racket, not part of a competitive political system. The impoverishment of generations, though, is a very real phenomenon.
Other undesirable side-effects of sanctions are all too obvious, Demarais notes. Since regime change isn’t in the cards, sanctions seed the soil for future crises rather than resolving present ones:
In many cases, America’s sanctions foster anti-American sentiment instead of winning the hearts and minds of the citizens they intend to save from rogue regimes.
Demarais notes that sanctions are actually executed by businesses, not governments. This is one of their most appealing features for politicians because they can show their electorates that they are “doing something” at no cost. However, the burden to comply with unpredictable sanctions regimes forces international firms to fully abandon markets (and assets). Owing to this fact, once-imposed, sanctions effectively blacklist countries from participation in the global economy.
For sanctions to work, there must be hope that they will one day be removed, but citing the case of Iran, businesses didn’t take advantage of the thaw achieved via the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, fearing that they would be reimposed (which they were, during the Trump administration). Furthermore, sanctions can cause spikes in the prices of essential commodities, affecting populations far beyond the target country or regime. For example, Demarais cites how sanctions against a Russian aluminum magnate had just this effect, causing a panic around the world.
Another knock against sanctions is that they only work when the US has significant economic ties with the other country. This simply isn’t the case when it comes to the aforementioned adversaries. The case of China, however, poses a different challenge to sanctions as an effective tool.
The deep supply chain connections between the US and China are well known, as is Western anxiety about the potential for Chinese belligerance in the future. Surely, sanctions would be on the table if such events were to come, right? Not necessarily.
Demarais suggests that the PRC is preparing to “decouple” (economically separate) from the West. Rather than see such a development as a calamity to avoid, Chinese officials see it as an inevitability to prepare for. Similarly, Demarais doesn’t see Russia ever rejoining the Western economic order; it will likely float into the Chinese orbit. The division of the world into well-defined economic blocs would further defang sanctions as an instrument of American policy.
The historical record makes it clear that isolation strengthens unsavory regimes and increases human misery. People held captive by illiberal regimes have little recourse when cut off from the rest of the world economically, politically, and culturally. This is, after all, what authoritarian rulers want in the first place.
The US and its allies shouldn’t be doing this work for them. Domestic political resistance is impossible, and under sanctions, economic resistance is also a nonstarter. Instead, policymakers ought to guarantee that people can resist in the most meaningful way possible: with their feet.
