Has anyone else noticed that governments' sanctions on other countries don’t really do anything to change their policies or strategies these days? Countries sanction one another over something or other and guess what happens?
Nothing! That’s what.
Life may get harder for regular people, more expensive. But the targeted leaderships of those countries don’t care and don’t respond.
The United States has been sanctioning Iran for — what? – 47 years. Ever since their revolutionary radicals seized more than five dozen U.S. hostages and held them for 444 days.
The mullahs and Revolutionary Guard gunmen still engage in the business of violence when it suits them. Forget any ceasefires or agreements. Arming and guiding the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas to kill and blow things up in neighboring countries. Iran even guns down thousands of its own citizens. And they just killed two U.S. service members in Jordan.
Believing in the everlasting honor of martyrdom will do that to you.
The United States and numerous other countries have been sanctioning Russia, Vladimir Putin, and his wealthy cronies and state organizations since 2008. That’s when he annexed two provinces of Georgia.
Six years later, in defiance of accords Moscow signed years before, Putin seized Crimea and two provinces in eastern Ukraine. They shot down a Malaysia Airlines flight that happened to fly over, killing 298. Then Putin began kidnapping local children and giving them to Russian families to erase the next generation.
What happened?
More sanctions.
Then, what did Russia do?
Nothing at all throughout Donald Trump’s first term. Putin knew better. Then, when "empathetic" Joe Biden became president, Putin began organizing a full-scale invasion. The next year he launched it, confident that any local resistance would get brushed aside within days.
What happened? First of all, Ukraine fought back. Numerous nations imposed a whole array of new sanctions. Surely, that would show the ex-KGB colonel that the West was seriously opposed to his aggression and he should change his mind. He didn't.
Joe Biden — or maybe it was Jill in his mental absence — even stopped buying Russian oil, the economic lifeblood that finances Putin's war.
What happened? The global price of oil went up, of course, and Putin began raking in billions more in new profits.
Now, four-plus years and way more than a million casualties later, an amazingly valiant Ukraine is still fighting back with imagination and impressive courage, plus much outside help. Putin’s wasting the lives of about a thousand young Russian men per day. But the only threats to Putin are internal.
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The fact is sanctions, even the new ones that the U.S. Treasury Department applied last week, do not change a nation’s policies or strategies. They hurt the economy, for sure, boost inflation, and damage the fortunes of some wealthy. Iranians have felt that for years. The country remains the world's top exporter of terrorism.
A couple of rich Russians have had their yachts seized in the West. But they surely have safe bank accounts in Cyprus. And they better not complain about Putin if they don’t want to die in prison or fall out of a high-rise.
The U.S. Treasury's new sanctions affect more than 50 Iranians, entities, and vessels involved in a massive sanctions-evading operation.
Notice how quickly the shadow fleets vanished?
No, you didn’t. Nothing changed.
A new Russian sanctions bill is in the Senate now. Yawn.
What's actually surprising in both the Iran and Russia cases is that there could be anything left that hasn’t already been sanctioned. Governments have been announcing such economic and legal “punishments” since 1979 on Iran and 2008 on Russia.
Sanction announcements do make for outstanding photo ops stateside. Officials look grim and serious. That’s how they demonstrate action these days.
By golly, look at what we’re doing today! This will surely show we mean business. More importantly, it will show voters at home that we are doing something for their D.C. salaries. Sounds good on the evening news, which is how success is measured nowadays. High-fives all around.
No one will follow up, though, and see what effects, if any, that dramatic announcement ever has down the road.
Everyone knows that today’s media are too young to have any sense of history. Obama’s media people played them like a violin. Bill Clinton is ancient history to them (and he looks it). Ronald Reagan. Hmm, Ronald Reagan. They’ve heard the name.
Nearly 100 million Americans have been born since 9/11. Which means that close to one-third of the nation’s total population has no knowledge, or possibly even awareness, of that awful day and the stunning sense of vulnerability and foreign dangers seared into older minds by those visions of explosions and deaths.
I’m not counting on our schools to impart much valid history anymore.
So, little surprise, I guess, that enough New Yorkers would elect a communist Muslim immigrant from Uganda to rule over their city as mayor on the 25th anniversary of that deadly day.
Or that so many young voters seem to be falling for the tempting “freebies” of socialist candidates for Congress. Free healthcare for all, right?
A school-teacher friend once asked her class what they thought the country looked like in the old days. The consensus: it was black-and-white.
If that’s the depth of the sense of history of many, then the idea of even more sanctions on top of existing sanctions could sound appealing.
Even though absolutely none of these economic strictures have forced the leaders of Iran or Russia to change or even alter their deadly aggressive behaviors.
For them, pretending to negotiate a peace agreement or even a ceasefire, or anything really, is just a means to stretch out the conflict. Russia did not keep its word in the Budapest Memorandum to leave Ukraine alone when it gave up its nuclear weapons.
Tehran was happy to take the billions in cash that Barack Obama paid, up front, for them to sign his worthless nuclear pact in 2015, the one Trump wisely abandoned.
With the naivete of Democrats, both Obama and Joe Biden tried rewarding Iran and Russia in advance. That cost billions. Erased Western leverage. Accomplished zip.
Iran just keeps keeping on with its dream of funding terrorism abroad, building nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them on Israel and the Great Satan. This is religion, not policy.
Thankfully, President Trump and Israel put a temporary end to that nightmare for us last summer. And they have crippled, for now, Iran’s navy and air defense systems.
But there is no incentive for that regime to give up or agree to something that sounds good at a foreign news conference but explodes as soon as necessary. The regime’s entire purpose and reason for being is to crush the infidels.
There is no compromise in alahu akbar.
Villains like Iran and Putin have no concerns about voters; they execute dissidents in the streets or help them fall out of high-rise windows.
However, they do know and count on voters and legislators in democracies having limited patience for conflicts, especially ones that drag on longer than advertised in advance.
Trump is on no midterm ballot, but his party’s control of Congress is. The longer and closer Iran can drag out that unpopular conflict to Nov. 3, the more Tehran figures his powers will be damaged one way or another.
Putin doesn’t care about that war’s duration either. Thirty-thousand dead last month, another 30,000 this month. Small potatoes to keep his vow and job. To paraphrase Jay Leno's old Doritos ad, “Kill all you want. We’ll send more.”
Cynical? Oh, you bet! But that’s what we’re up against in today’s world of warfare.
