Bret Devereaux

This thing! Sanctions have their uses (mostly actually as a diplomatic tool for bloc-building, I'd argue), but as a means of suasion, they really only work on issues an adversary considers relatively unimportant. https://twitter.com/EmmaMAshford/status/1346168731362349058 …

That said, I think there is a tendency to confuse sanctions-as-suasion vs. sanctions-as-economic-warfare (not being made by @EmmaMAshford here, to be clear), because we often pretend we're doing the former when we're really doing the later.

"We are going to intentionally crater the economy of X so they have less resources to do Y" is a fairly reasonable strategic maneuver, but not a very politic one given that 1) the pain falls on regular people and 2) admitting the goal is essentially admitting to hostilities.

Thus frequently pretending - or worse, convincing ourselves - we're using sanctions to convince a regime to change course, when we're really using sanctions to draw lines between 'us' and 'them' in international disputes (thus bloc-building) while engaging in economic warfare.

And of course that pretense is part of the larger pretense that US foreign policy has anything to do with concern for human rights — "to punish this regime for imposing suffering on its people, we'll impose even more ourselves" would be a tough line to parrot with a straight face

Sure, though I'd argue US foreign policy should - even from a pure realist perspective - concern itself with human rights. To do otherwise is what Andre Beaufre calls a 'psychologically false note' which entails severe costs in indirect strategy so often shaped by public opinion

Well from a purely cynical realist perspective, the benefits of the US being able to rely on horrifically antidemocratic/repressive allies and proxies like Egypt or Saudi Arabia seem pretty substantial, hard to outweigh with some vague sense of appealing to international goodwill