Political Warfare: Gone But Not Forgotten

A lost political art in desperate need for resurrection

Welcome to so many new subscribers I have received over the past week. If you are interested, here are some of my previous writings you might find interesting on Russia.

Russo-Georgian War's Anniversary (August 8, 2021)

Putin's Soft Power (September 8, 2021)

Sacrificing the Russian Threat to the Chinese God (September 25, 2021)

Who's To Blame for Russian Revanchism? (November 8, 2021)

Russia Sets To Invade Ukraine (November 17, 2021)

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The Biden administration announced massive sanctions against Russia. Because sanctions against Iran and North Korea have been very effective in coercing their behaviors. Oh wait!

Sanctions are mostly a post-Cold-War phenomenon. During the Cold War, they were used rarely and effectively. They succeeded against the United Kingdom—yes, we imposed sanctions on a NATO ally—during the Suez Crisis. Some also argue that they succeeded against South Africa to end apartheid, but there are also people who suggest that, by the time we enacted sanctions, South Africa had decided to end apartheid anyway. In both cases, however, the regimes had democratic constituencies. (Yes, the apartheid regime was an evil dictatorship of white people, but there was democratic accountability to white South Africans who voted in elections.) Autocracies do not have democratic accountability of any sort. So sanctions struggle to bear fruits.

As former sanctions coordinator for the Barack Obama administration, Ambassador Dan Fried, has noted, sanctions very often are a result of an impulse to do something. And when you cannot—or are unwilling to—take military action, then sanctions are the low hanging fruit.

The benefits of sanctions are generally twofold: You send a signal to your domestic constituents, allies, partners, and adversaries that you care about this issue and make a value-judgment on an adversary’s actions; second, sanctions on the scale we have imposed on Iran also succeed in crippling the country’s economy, hence reducing economic and military capabilities of the adversary, while potentially creating domestic unrest.

The problem with sanctions is that they don’t succeed in changing an autocrat’s behavior. Further, the excessive use of sanctions, especially unilaterally and without international consensus like with Iran, could (read would) eventually result in countries’ creating alternative avenues like the use of cryptocurrencies and special purpose vehicles to circumvent sanctions and hence reduce the economic power of the United States, not to mention replacing dollar as their reserve currencies. Further, sanctions hit an adversary’s economy for the most part, but they also affect our own and friends’ economies.

I am not anti-sanctions. I am anti-only-sanctions. As I like to say, all tools of statecraft should always be used against all adversaries. There is an acronym, DIME, which stands for diplomacy, intelligence, military, and economics. None is in its own sufficient, but all are always necessary. And if you want quick results, only military could provide it. The other three take years to bear fruit.

I’ve been thinking about what the United States is not doing against Russia other than sanctions and military deterrence through NATO. There is a lot we are not doing. Let me put it this way. We are not doing anything else other than sanctions and NATO deterrence! There are immediate actions in response to the crisis we should undertake, but there are also long-term measures should implement anyway to weaken Putin’s regime.