91–100 of 144 posts
For some context, I strongly encourage you to read "90% of everything" by Rose George. It is a brilliant expose of the shipping industry, and it's a really bad industry. Flags of convenience, forcing people to work on ships, not paying them, not even really caring if they fall overboard. The international shipping industry is damn near a hate crime.
I used to believe strongly in financial sanctions over war but I'm becoming more skeptical. Markets and industry are a very hard thing to constrain at a global scale. To do it effectively you basically encourage a giant financial surveillance state and need put huge pressure on partner countries - who often don't even implement it meaningfully. You make business harder for everyone and create lucrative black market o…
25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like. He recently revisited that in FP magazine ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi... ) arguing for…
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.
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25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like. He recently revisited that in FP magazine ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi... ) arguing for…
The same Dan Dexter that pushed for the Iraq war? Should we treat his opinions as such?
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Great. Russian revenue from gas and oil fell considerably since the start of the war.
How many years does it typically take for crippling sanctions to bring a country crawling to the bargaining table?
The words you apparently missed from what GP wrote are: "slightly reduce" and "some leverage". Nobody said that sanctions end wars or bring about peace negotiations on their own.
I used to believe strongly in financial sanctions over war but I'm becoming more skeptical. Markets and industry are a very hard thing to constrain at a global scale. To do it effectively you basically encourage a giant financial surveillance state and need put huge pressure on partner countries - who often don't even implement it meaningfully. You make business harder for everyone and create lucrative black market o…
Great call. Feel free to head to the front lines and put your life on the line. Or should only other people do that?
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> Europe kept buying Russian oil and gas, because other sources could not come online quickly enough They did do sanctions, so I don't know what you're trying to argue. > Tariffs would have only made energy even more expensive than it already was. Not as expensive as outright sanctions, of course. As I said - sanctions are discrete (yes or no), whereas tariffs are a continuous knob.
There were essentially no sanctions impacting Russian energy exports to Europe. Those would have hurt Europe much more than Russia. If you can't export something, the damage is proportional to the volume of the exports. But if you don't have enough energy, your entire economy suffers. The increases in energy prices mostly came from voluntary attempts to find alternatives to Russian energy and from Russia constraining…
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Great. Russian revenue from gas and oil fell considerably since the start of the war.
How many years does it typically take for crippling sanctions to bring a country crawling to the bargaining table?
The real question is what if there were none - Russia would have more money and thus have done a lot more damage to Ukraine - but there is no way to measure damage they could have done.
I used to believe strongly in financial sanctions over war but I'm becoming more skeptical. Markets and industry are a very hard thing to constrain at a global scale. To do it effectively you basically encourage a giant financial surveillance state and need put huge pressure on partner countries - who often don't even implement it meaningfully. You make business harder for everyone and create lucrative black market o…
25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like. He recently revisited that in FP magazine ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi... ) arguing for…
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.
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Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions, that wouldn't encourage as much routing around. Tax Russian oil/gas at the max point in the Laffer (-esque) curve, with all the revenue flowing as direct aid to Ukraine. (I know 'tariff' has become a dirty word these days to due the obvious abuse, but I swear I'm making this comment in good faith)
Europe kept buying Russian oil and gas, because other sources could not come online quickly enough. Tariffs would have only made energy even more expensive than it already was. Now it's mostly Hungary and Slovakia buying Russian energy, as well as some LNG imports. Those two countries are not too keen on sanctioning Russia, especially in ways that would hurt their economy. Any attempts to impose tariffs on energy imp…
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Canada also recommended to leave residential doors unlocked with the car keys in plain sight to reduce the chances of property damage and personal harm when the thieves come for your car, so Canada can get stuffed.
I thought this was made up nonsense, but for those who are thinking the same thing as me, a Toronto police officer really recommended doing exactly this [0]. [0] https://globalnews.ca/news/10359055/leave-car-keys-the-front...