Sanctions

I am not, you may have come to realize, a warmonger. I am, perhaps, the exact opposite. So when I say what I'm about to say, you'll need to brace yourselves, because it might sound like I'm calling for massive airstrikes and ground assaults and all that other crap that people who say what I'm about to say usually call for after they get done saying what I'm about to say.

If it didn't work the first two times, it's not going to work the third time. And by that, I mean that, to distill my thesis, sanctions don't work.

My first comment was addressed to the fact that the UN has apparently decided that a third round of sanctions on Iran will undoubtedly do the trick. Guess what? I bet it won't. I'm sure that the Iranian government is just quaking in its boots about a third round of things of which they already have two rounds, which certainly did the trick in the stopping them department, didn't they?

Sanctions are a nice idea, sure. But what they essentially boil down to is that either they just make people pissed off or they make everyone but the actual targets of the sanctions poorer, sometimes both. They usually result in a diplomatic climate hardly conducive for constructive talks, and they tend not to have much of any effect on anything because not everyone supports them.

You want to see a case of "sanctions" really working? Try the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II. I mean, Germany sanctioned the living hell out of England. They were sinking any ship they came across. That was a sanction with teeth. And in the end, it pissed the British off, and a case could be made that it brought the United States into the war. Sure, there was some belt-tightening. But the only reason it came even close to working was because the British Isles are, get this, islands, so it was fairly difficult to get goods in in the first place.

Or how about Japan? The great powers sure showed them in the 1930s. We sanctioned them all the way up the tree. We sanctioned them so hard that they decided they needed to prove to the world that they were just as big and strong as everyone else, so they invaded China. And we sanctioned them for that too. Helped a lot on December 7, 1941. Helped the Philippines a heap. Helped all the Chinese in Nanking. And then, during the war, we cut the Japanese off. We took away every source of raw materials they had, cut them off from the rest of the world, and they were contemplating meeting us on the beach with sharpened sticks and hand grenades. Starving them out did precious little.

I could go on. North Korea. Iraq. Iraq again. Cuba. Burma, or whatever the hell they're calling it now. Iran. Lybia. And so on. Sanctions have worked so well in those situations, haven't they? Cuba is celebrating 50 glorious years of sanctions in a few years or so. North Korea is hurting for food, but they're not hurting for plutonium. Iran is just getting more and more radical.

Again, you can also see how the use of force to solve these little problems doesn't work either. But I dread the day when we live in a world where the only two options are siege or pitched battle. Sounds like a bad video game to me.

But go for it, UN. Why not? It's not like anyone will talk to one another, and it has to beat the pitched battle alternative. Maybe if it doesn't work, you should try a fourth round.