There has never, never, been a single “adversarial” (which is usually a one-sided relationship to begin with, but leaving that aside…) nation that has caved to US demands due to sanctions from the US and its allies. Honestly if that’s incorrect, then please, find an example. I think I’m being fully reasonable here, so if I’m just wrong here then show me.
The best argument I can come up with against me here is if you’re talking about war situations. The US refused to trade with Nazi Germany after a certain point and same for imperial Japan, etc.
I would say the fundamental difference here is well, for one, those sanctions were meant to stop aggression by powerful states actively engaged in atrocities on a mass scale. So totally moral and just to place heavy pressure on them while also aiding allies already engaged in the war. Absolutely.
The difference between those sanctions and things like the embargo on Cuba or sanctions against Iran, Russia, etc. is now days we just place sanctions on states and step back, fold the arms, and say “ok, now watch them fail!” or cave to US demands which is just failing in every case to my knowledge. They want Cuba to totally eliminate, I dunno, all land reform initiatives and give the Cuban-Americans in Miami their plantations back. Or they want Iran to give the US corporations premium and full access to their oil. North Korea… well, no one even knows wtf they want from them. Just to torture then in perpetuity for embarrassing the superpower post-WWII still effectively at its height of military dominance into forcing a stalemate. That’s unforgivable I guess. Gotta just kill them all if we can.
The sanctions in the case of wars was “these are active enemies of the state, we will refuse them any trade they desire so we do aid in their war efforts against us or our allies.” Now it’s just “you refused to give into our demands 70 years ago, that made us big mad, and we will now make sure to the best of our ability that you don’t have commodities like those in the west have come to rely upon and associate (solely, oddly) with prosperity and success. Then we will point and laugh and call you a failed state… due to our own actions.” All this accomplishes is insulating “bad actors” (whom the US created most of the time) and giving them free propaganda “you don’t have nice TVs from Japan because the US tells them to deny us until we surrender! We won’t surrender!” or whatever the fuck. Literally just breeding resentment, and when you wipe away the lies and propaganda (sometimes based in truth but never with context) you have to ask “why are we sanctioning Iran?” as a relevant current question. You quickly discover, again if you wipe away western lies and racism, that Iran is sanctioned because we fucked around there, they kicked us out, and that made us fucking angry. Us being our capitalist and political class. Now days yeah people talk about women’s rights (btw, abortion was eliminated as a right in the US recently… hmm) and LGBTQ rights (yeah… again, US should probably not speak about that) or their “anti-Israel” stance which is basically just anti-US and anti-imperialism generally. Israel is the instigator in that region and placing any of that blame on Iran is just comical. This doesn’t mean I like the government of Iran, but that government is there for a very simple reason: the United States (and Britain, etc.) fucking around in the Middle East. So why the fuck are we sanctioning them? Those sanctions aren’t working, clearly. John Bolton has been edging to the idea of nuking Tehran for like 50 years. The sanctions aren’t doing anything except increasing (rightful) hatred for Americans/Israelis, etc., helping the theocracy dig in deeper, and ensuring that Iran will remain this isolated state in perpetual poverty cut off from much trade due to US sanctions.
So you’re wrong for two reasons: you’re arguing that sanctions of this kind on Iran, Russia, etc. might work or have worked and two for the moral reasoning since it seems like you’re sort of justifying their existence to begin with which is gross to me. If sanctions DID work any human with a heart would still oppose them when the reasons are those such as the US employs their sanctions. What right does the US have to unilaterally demand these countries do whatever? That’s what the UN is for.
And btw here at the end I remembered that the US placed genocidal levels of sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s after their invasion into Kuwait (which is a whole other discussion around Saddam being a US asset against Iran for a long time + HW Bush giving sort of a half-assed “I might look the other way, Saddam…” before the invasion and them immediately flipping into full blown “Wow, he did this, wow, wtf Saddam, wow”…) that resulted in a decline in their country from a previously, you know, they had electricity in Baghdad and enough food to eat for sure. Thanks to the US people were starving to death. And yet Saddam remained in power. His cult of popularity remained until the US invaded and eventually had him executed. Did the sanctions break his rule? Did they achieve literally any pressure at all? This was a state that, no joke, the US was totally crippling and nothing happened to the government there. I don’t see how one could argue these sanctions achieve anything beyond suffering. And supporting them is just supporting death and misery for the sake of it. There is no justice, no rationale, it’s just “yeah, those people are bad and deserve to die because they won’t overthrow their evil government! (Meanwhile, American government carries out so many genocides no one can fucking count anymore. But our people are innocent and cannot be blamed!)”
There has never, never, been a single “adversarial” (which is usually a one-sided relationship to begin with, but leaving that aside…) nation that has caved to US demands due to sanctions from the US and its allies. Honestly if that’s incorrect, then please, find an example. I think I’m being fully reasonable here, so if I’m just wrong here then show me.
The best argument I can come up with against me here is if you’re talking about war situations. The US refused to trade with Nazi Germany after a certain point and same for imperial Japan, etc.
I would say the fundamental difference here is well, for one, those sanctions were meant to stop aggression by powerful states actively engaged in atrocities on a mass scale. So totally moral and just to place heavy pressure on them while also aiding allies already engaged in the war. Absolutely.
The difference between those sanctions and things like the embargo on Cuba or sanctions against Iran, Russia, etc. is now days we just place sanctions on states and step back, fold the arms, and say “ok, now watch them fail!” or cave to US demands which is just failing in every case to my knowledge. They want Cuba to totally eliminate, I dunno, all land reform initiatives and give the Cuban-Americans in Miami their plantations back. Or they want Iran to give the US corporations premium and full access to their oil. North Korea… well, no one even knows wtf they want from them. Just to torture then in perpetuity for embarrassing the superpower post-WWII still effectively at its height of military dominance into forcing a stalemate. That’s unforgivable I guess. Gotta just kill them all if we can.
The sanctions in the case of wars was “these are active enemies of the state, we will refuse them any trade they desire so we do aid in their war efforts against us or our allies.” Now it’s just “you refused to give into our demands 70 years ago, that made us big mad, and we will now make sure to the best of our ability that you don’t have commodities like those in the west have come to rely upon and associate (solely, oddly) with prosperity and success. Then we will point and laugh and call you a failed state… due to our own actions.” All this accomplishes is insulating “bad actors” (whom the US created most of the time) and giving them free propaganda “you don’t have nice TVs from Japan because the US tells them to deny us until we surrender! We won’t surrender!” or whatever the fuck. Literally just breeding resentment, and when you wipe away the lies and propaganda (sometimes based in truth but never with context) you have to ask “why are we sanctioning Iran?” as a relevant current question. You quickly discover, again if you wipe away western lies and racism, that Iran is sanctioned because we fucked around there, they kicked us out, and that made us fucking angry. Us being our capitalist and political class. Now days yeah people talk about women’s rights (btw, abortion was eliminated as a right in the US recently… hmm) and LGBTQ rights (yeah… again, US should probably not speak about that) or their “anti-Israel” stance which is basically just anti-US and anti-imperialism generally. Israel is the instigator in that region and placing any of that blame on Iran is just comical. This doesn’t mean I like the government of Iran, but that government is there for a very simple reason: the United States (and Britain, etc.) fucking around in the Middle East. So why the fuck are we sanctioning them? Those sanctions aren’t working, clearly. John Bolton has been edging to the idea of nuking Tehran for like 50 years. The sanctions aren’t doing anything except increasing (rightful) hatred for Americans/Israelis, etc., helping the theocracy dig in deeper, and ensuring that Iran will remain this isolated state in perpetual poverty cut off from much trade due to US sanctions.
So you’re wrong for two reasons: you’re arguing that sanctions of this kind on Iran, Russia, etc. might work or have worked and two for the moral reasoning since it seems like you’re sort of justifying their existence to begin with which is gross to me. If sanctions DID work any human with a heart would still oppose them when the reasons are those such as the US employs their sanctions. What right does the US have to unilaterally demand these countries do whatever? That’s what the UN is for.
And btw here at the end I remembered that the US placed genocidal levels of sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s after their invasion into Kuwait (which is a whole other discussion around Saddam being a US asset against Iran for a long time + HW Bush giving sort of a half-assed “I might look the other way, Saddam…” before the invasion and them immediately flipping into full blown “Wow, he did this, wow, wtf Saddam, wow”…) that resulted in a decline in their country from a previously, you know, they had electricity in Baghdad and enough food to eat for sure. Thanks to the US people were starving to death. And yet Saddam remained in power. His cult of popularity remained until the US invaded and eventually had him executed. Did the sanctions break his rule? Did they achieve literally any pressure at all? This was a state that, no joke, the US was totally crippling and nothing happened to the government there. I don’t see how one could argue these sanctions achieve anything beyond suffering. And supporting them is just supporting death and misery for the sake of it. There is no justice, no rationale, it’s just “yeah, those people are bad and deserve to die because they won’t overthrow their evil government! (Meanwhile, American government carries out so many genocides no one can fucking count anymore. But our people are innocent and cannot be blamed!)”