Sanctions are a negative-rate compounding system. Sarah Paine from the US Naval War College:
> People look at sanctions and go, “Oh, they don't work because you don't make whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing.” What they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's annoying you over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea. It's powerful over several generations.
North Korean citizens have now normalized to poverty and destitution after generations of sanctions. There are quite a few of them working alongside the South Asian labour force in the Middle East, engaged in slavish labour that the Gulf nations are often criticized for.
Would it be nice if sanctions were equivalent to invasion and does that matter to the argument that they are better to implement than do nothing?
But what they've done is worsen the lot for the layman North Korean.
North Korea was already a nuclear threat decades ago. Where they were lagging behind was in ICBMs that could reach the continental United States.
I still have no idea what you think is an alternative that would have made a North Korea with South Korea's economy a great thing for arms control.
Keeping North Korea poor has all been waste of time unless our goal was to have 75 years of "wasted time" before a potentially uncontrollable escalation with China.
I'm not really optimistic about western Europe's willingness to absorb damage in it economy in order to damage Russia. France's government expenditures are 55% of GDP, much of it financed by borrowing. That's the level maintained by major powers in the world wars. Can the French state demand more from a private sector that's funding the equivalent of a total war?
Worse yet, western European politics gives you the strong impression all these expenditures are necessary to prevent the election of a pro-Russian government or a bloody revolution.
Hence why sanctions seem to be something of a joke.
Might as well do whatever is most effective, which is likely to be harsh sanctions followed by military action to fully enforce them.
The previous Russian imperial project, the Soviet Union, ended 35 years ago, not 80. It's easy to overlook that they forcibly redrew borders and kept them redrawn for decades (and still to this day do keep some territories they conquered in imperialist wars when they were still allied with Nazi Germany).
It's not like ww2 where you have increasingly fewer people who were old enough to consciously experience it. It's very likely that most people on this forum were around for the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian imperialism.
No one is saying that states will never collapse, will never split up, will never secede. But the fact that no existing state tried to take advantage of the confusion in the USSR and gain revenge for an ancient wrong? That was the result of this global norm, which held up even as the USSR (and Yugoslavia) fell apart. And that is a very good thing.
Cool story bro. Almost like Kosovo never happened.
What are the current borders of Yugoslavia?
Did anybody in the west argue that redrawing the borders of Yugoslavia was against global norms?
Did you?
Eastern Europe looks a heck of a lot different, as did British India.
In all fairness, 80 years ago, the world was on the cusp of a massive border redraw, but the Phillipine Islands were still a US territory.
The “global community” you’re referring to consists of America and its client states—only around 1/8th of the world’s population.
He recently revisited that in FP magazine (https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi...) arguing for keeping sanctions on Russia even though they clearly aren't going to coerce Russia into abandoning their war in Ukraine. The first reason is to re-enforce the global norm against territorial expansion. We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce. And the other reason is to weaken their economy for the grinding war of attrition that is currently happening, and not make territorial expansion easy for them.