War is shooting people dead.
There is a stark difference.
At any rate, sanctions create consequences for trade for third parties as well, so any country that doesn't come along on it will also face the possibility of being shut off from trade with the EU, the US, and the rest of their allied nations. No country in the world save China can endure that for long without completely destabilizing their economy and their legal order.
And make no mistake, people will die due to these sanctions. Russia's medical system will not endure lack of trade for long, and it's likely there will be food shortages as well. This is entirely independent of whether or not it's the right thing to do. People need to understand that these actions have real human consequences, whether they agree with the cost or not.
Sanctions as enacted here are not "I'm not talking to you", they're "I will punch anyone who keeps talking to you."
Also, I guarantee you that if a country sanctioned the US in a way that actually impacted the american economy (again, probably only China could pull this off right now), the US would consider it an act of aggression. Just nationalizing American interests has been cause for American intervention before.
Hardly. We are’t going to bomb a country that goes against the sanctions. They will just also be sanctioned.
We are forcing people to pick a side to do business with, not punching them.
Yes, and because most countries in the world are smaller than the US or Russia, they will suffer because of it. Likely with people dying, either directly or indirectly. The smaller the country, the more sanctions hurt, the more it's like getting punched in the face.
Most countries in the world can't afford to be excluded from trade with the western bloc.
In the US' case, sanctions often also come with things like "withholding the target country's reserves held with the US central bank", which do material harm to the target country's economy.
People keep trying to frame this as "just not buying gas/oil" but the funniest thing about that is that for the most part, the sanctioning countries are still buying gas from russia. That is literally the one thing not included in these sanctions. The sanctions would probably work better if they did stop buying natural resources, but the backsplash from doing that would be immense.
Anyways, it's awfully convenient that the tools America is uniquely positioned to use to cause harm to other countries (economic sanctions, targeted drone strikes, etc) are never "cause for war."
And again, this is completely independent of whether or not it's the right thing to do. If you can't get over your cognitive dissonance long enough to recognize that sometimes the right thing to do can cause immense harm, I don't know what to tell you. You should still recognize that sanctions are not neutral acts, and they do kill people as surely as a gun does. Thinking otherwise means you're somehow still stuck in the 19th century's idea of war (and even they would probably consider a trade blockade an act of war).
Economic sanctions are the rich countries way of being a bully. We are all interconnected and cutting one country's access and resources is worse than attacking them.
Topically, it means not rolling tanks into another country and killing their people. Not sure why this is difficult to understand. Russia isn't reacting to sanctions. Sanctions are a reaction to war.
Russia isn’t tiny resource poor Cuba. Everyone who refuses to trade with Russia suffers real losses as they are forced to get key goods from other sources. For central and Eastern European counties this is a real issue.
Imagine the US sanctioning Mexico… yes, it would hurt Mexico’s economy, but it would also devastate the economy of the South West USA.
I agree it’s certainly not the same as direct warfare, but its definitely somewhere in the middle, and can particularly castostrophic when done in a concerted multilateral fashion (ie. North Korea).