Iran, Venezuela and Cuba are and were shitholes compared to todays Russia. The immediate QoL impact on the average Russian will be far bigger than it was for the average citizens of those countries.

> QoL impact on the average Russian

What is the "average" Russian exactly? Moscow and St. Petersburg is only ~10% of the population.

~20% is completely rural (Boratesque) and the remainder (from what I've seen from vloggers) is _extremely_ depressing isolated small cities.

You’re absolutely right, I definitely abused “average” there. Really I meant the middle classes and up.

I mean the places which matter, big cities like Moscow, St Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don.

The Boratesque villagers won’t be the ones who might overthrow the government, but the city-dwellers could.

Iran, Venezuela and Cuba had/have a decent middle class too, if you ignore the rural peasants and people in other places that "don't matter".

This surprised me, so I checked. Moscow + St. Petersburg metro areas are 25+ million. They're actually 17% of the population, which is still pretty low considering their importance; Moscow's GDP alone is listed as $1 trillion, while Russia as a whole is $1.48 trillion. So the 20 million people in Moscow hold a lot more power, relatively, than the far-scattered 120 million

One detail in the case of Venezuela is that most sanctions were to individual people and companies associated with the government, not to the entire population.

Sanctions on Iran worked pretty well until Trump torpedoed the nuclear deal. They're understandably leery of restarting it now.

Venezuela's economy got pretty well demolished.

Cuba's only blocked off from the US; they've been happily trading with pretty much everyone else.

> Sanctions on Iran worked pretty well until Trump torpedoed the nuclear deal. They're understandably leery of restarting it now.

Reminds me of an article I read this morning (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-27/war-on-ukraine-where-...):

> [Under Obama] Iran made a fortune out of its nuclear deal — halting but not abandoning its pursuit of nuclear weapons — and used the windfall to fund terrorism in the Middle East.

I'm sure they'd love a restart under the same terms.

There will be no restarting - they are even closer to having nuclear arms than before because we abandoned the deal. It wasn't a perfect deal, but it was real progress and would have significantly slowed nuclear development (experts say ~15 years instead of 2 years).

It's hard to have any deal when repubs have pledged to abandon it (regardless of what it is) when they have control again.

A legislature-ratified treaty would hold more weight but it would never get passed, regardless of the terms.

The modern schizophrenia of the US political system is making things difficult for the whole world. It used to be that US foreign policy could be considered fundamentally consistent across administrations, on the big topics; now, every 4 years, it's a coin toss.

No. This is wrong. They got their own money back as part of the agreement. Hard to believe this is posted in good faith.

Honestly, having lived in the Middle East for 22 years, I’m not sure what Iran-sponsored terrorism is being talked about here. The only plausible thing is the Yemeni conflict, and that’s more about US allies Saudi and UAE bombing the shit out of a poor country (Yemen).

"Iran-sponsored terrorism", in the US press, is any support for enemies of Israel - even when they are nation states building conventional forces.

That article's clearly an op-ed:

> The Trump presidency. A man who exploited the worst of America, trashed alliances, cosied up to despots yet was a symptom of a system already poisonous.

"Made a fortune" describes the lifting of sanctions as part of the deal; Iran got a variety of its frozen assets back. That we wasted that leverage (and years of multi-national diplomacy) by blowing up the deal unilaterally for no good reason is not Iran's fault.

An op-ed is a type of article. The relevant paragraph was describing Obama's time in office. Do I have to qualify there is plenty of bad things said about Trump [and other x-presidents] in the article too?

> The relevant paragraph was describing Obama's time in office.

Deceptively so.

I actually agree with you. Stan Grant's language here is loose and could be reasonably seen as deceptive. I will complain to the editor.