Sanctions & Economic Isolation As Punitive Foreign Policy:
Is The USA Shooting Itself In The Foot Here?
READ: ‘If you go to war with somebody, you don’t keep your money in their pocket’ - Russia might lose trillions of dollars due to the invasion of Ukraine, a leading scholar on inequality and globalisation Branko Milanović estimates
The United States, to some extent, is undermining its own position vis-à-vis Russia by being tough on China because it leaves no other possibility to the Chinese companies than to go and to sell their products to Russia.
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
by framersqool
The above item comes from Novaya Gazeta Europe, one of five Russian-language sources I scan daily, along with Meduza, The Insider, Moscow Times, and Mediazona. The reader must decide for oneself the extent to which their coverages appear slanted in whichever direction, but taken in sum I find that all of them operate at an intellectual level which far exceeds anything I am finding either from 'western' media and even scholarly analysis, or even more so in the case of the various Ukrainian sources I also read on a daily basis.
In the cases of American, British, French, German, Polish and certainly Ukrainian sources I have become familiar with, which all publish English-language editions, the combination of naked pro-Ukraine partisanship, and consequently dumbed-down treatment of any subject matter you'd care to examine from them, makes it all easily recognizable as some of the most intelligence-insulting grade of propaganda I've ever encountered.
By contrast, these five Russian 'opposition' or 'dissident' outlets I've named all do certainly have their own, anti-Kremlin or anti-Putin more than pro-Ukraine, slant which can be spotted at a glance. But what sets them apart is that their various versions of editorial posturing do not operate from a premise that citizens of the Russian Federation are simply sub-human cretins and useful idiots, who only need to be told by western intellectuals how to go about being citizens of their own country to suit the currently-trendy 'liberal democracy' daydreams of western intellectuals.
I have sought to better understand Russia, and the USSR before the current era, for my entire adult life, on a basis of assuming that to dehumanize all things Russian is simply an updating of the fascist propaganda from the prior century.
I think it was after the 'fall of Saigon' (or 'reunification of Vietnam', depending on who you ask), when suddenly Vietnamese teenagers began to appear in my high school in California, and I immediately became acquainted with the word 'gooks', with which they were dehumanized in bulk by my own generation, that I came to face just how prone to blind fascist bigotries my own fellow Americans could be.
And so what I am seeing from all this 'liberal democracy' propaganda these days, out of western intellectuals and analysts, bears that same dehumanizing stain as regards all things Russian.
Not only does it completely bypass any responsible comparisons of the expansion of the Moscow state going back centuries with Manifest Destiny in our own country, or the brutal excesses of the British empire for centuries, but it also seems to assume that the reason Russians do not spontaneously 'rise up' and create some version of this 'liberal democracy' overnight, sufficient to soothe the sensibilities of middle-class western academia, is that they are all too stupid and ignorant to know what is good for them, according to western propagandists.
Before our eyes, in other words, anything to do with Russian life is being swept under the same filthy carpet of automatic bigotry as the one that had California teenagers calling their new schoolmates 'gooks' nearly a half-century ago.
What has really brought this phenomenon into personal focus for me very recently, is that last weekend I got a call from a lady I've known for years, who used to be a good neighbor and friend of mine here in Texhoma, before she and her husband and kids had moved down to north Texas around seven or eight years ago.
Yulia was born and raised in Moscow, was both an amateur athlete and professional swimmer who had traveled much of the world before meeting her husband Scotty, a high-plains cowpoke and horse-shoer who is about as Out-West the genuine article as it gets, while they both worked for Disney in Paris (!), she as a synchronized swimmer and he as a member of a wild-west show.
'Unlikely' is the term that springs to mind about that pair, but they have had a pretty good life together, since marrying in Moscow among her relatives, and then settling down out here in Dust Bowl country.
A solid enough marriage, that her befriending a man like me and showing some open enthusiasm toward the interests we manage to share, doesn't seem to bother Scotty at all. I've told them both, more than once, that he can have her, that she is way too complicated and difficult as a woman (believe me...) to be anything to me other than a good friend. She is in fact quite an attractive woman, but I tend to see her almost as the little sister I never had; the idea of ever even thinking of her in 'that way' would be too creepy for me to indulge in.
We spoke the other day for probably an hour and a half, as though just carrying on a single conversation that had begun well over a decade ago. And, lo and behold, she is still as Russian as any American citizen I ever knew can get, and she is also (!) a complex, experienced, thoughtful, contradictory, and basically ordinary (in her own extraordinary ways) human being.
Talking to my old friend Yulia from Moscow, and comparing that encounter with all this 'slava Ukrain' propaganda I've been seeing, where Russians are 'orcs' and it is 'only a matter of time' before their stupid country run by a stupid bunker dwarf collapses under the dead weight of its own permanent stupidity, it became that much more clear to me that for all the justifiable charges of illegal invasion and war crimes and all the rest, dealing with Russia's existence in the world will never be improved on by reducing them all to gooks.
If we are to be taken seriously as believing what we say we believe as Americans, that we are all created equal and that one's ethnicity or origins must not be used against anyone to determine the degree of humanity they may be defined as having, then this approach to Russia I have been seeing SO consistently in western and Ukrainian propaganda only brings shame and discredit to the cause of this 'liberal democracy', and will probably only serve to strengthen the patriotism of Russians, and thus prolong the suffering of all who are affected by the war regardless of whose side they are on. (I did mention Vietnam, for context's sake, and for good reason...)
Interestingly, what provoked the call from Yulia the other day was that I had sent her a text, after years of not being in touch with each other, about a bill proposed in the Texas legislature to ban Russian, Iranian, North Korean, and Chinese citizens from participating in any higher education institutions in Texas.
I knew that Yulia has often taught swimming courses in various American colleges for years, I was not clear on her current citizenship status, and I felt I owed my old friend a heads-up. Even more interestingly, this misguided exercise in Lone Star Republic gook-making had been proposed and sponsored by a Republican legislator....
As for the article above, it speaks quite well for itself. A Russian journalist is interviewing a Serbian economist, the item is translated into post-grad-level English, and taken all together it is but one example of how non-Anglo-American discourse on this war and all it entails is several levels higher, in terms of both scholarly knowledge and intellectual balance, than anything you'll see on CNN or BBC or in the Telegraph or New York Times.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
One may have noticed (to the extent that anyone reads what I write) that in these various entries here which begin as lengthy emails sent to Clayton along with my implicit consent to his publishing them here with only limited review on my part, that my focus in them tends to wander.
Call it my style, if it helps. I tend to write with the intent in mind of addressing 'an audience of one', even when I have neither a particular reader in mind nor any expectation that anyone might read it at all, such as the rather caustic comments I tend to leave on various Youtube channels. Many of these tend to incite only brief dismissive replies of the 'get a life' variety, which is fine. My life may not amount to much in anyone's currently-trendy metric of how many views one receives on social media, but I do maintain that a life of only being told what to think and then striving to be seen thinking it for the sake of anonymous approval from the digital gallery might not be much of a life either....
Which has to do with the rather meandering focus of the piece above.
According to its headline, chosen as such by our gracious host here, this is an essay about sanctions against Russia during the current war in Ukraine, which it is but kinda-not-really.
But what it's really about is a theme I have maintained throughout most of what I have written, in any format, over the course of this war: considering the source.
Taken as its own three-word imperative, 'consider the source' is probably most commonly used as a taunt, meaning that because of who has said a thing, that thing is not worth listening to.
But this is not what I mean at all. To consider the source of any form of communication is to, well, give it consideration, in a larger process of maintaining and updating a responsible point of view. Given that no source will ever be fully immune from its own biases, the point is to take these biases into account and factor them into a worthy assessment of the points the source is seeking to make.
Taken as such the topic of sanctions against Russia in itself is as much an exercise of this process as it meant as a topic to be examined as though it were in a vacuum all to itself. It is not.
Sanctions are in effect acts of war undertaken by other means, to paraphrase an aphorism. Seen as such these means bear examination not only as to their moral justification, but also as to their effectiveness in achieving what amount to warlike aims.
Have sanctions damaged or diminished the Russian state's war efforts against Ukraine? One guess is as good as another on that question, but potential answers may be found by inserting another aphorism, that for every measure there is a countermeasure.
To assume that the Kremlin regime has no such countermeasures at its disposal is to assume that those conducting the war against Ukraine must be... stupid. Which is why I drifted on into the other sub-topic of the essay, the hazards of assuming in any conflict that the opponent is an idiot, whose very humanity, when considering the sources of its actions in that light, must not be worthy of consideration at all. Call them all orcs who watch too much state TV and beat their wives, and deny them access to parts for their auto-assembly plants, that'll teach those katsaps to go starting wars, this rather tortuous logic seems to go.
And meanwhile, just yesterday I read another lengthy and quite detailed research piece, again from Novaya Gazeta and again first published in Russian, on how these sanctions might be the best thing to ever happen for the Chinese automotive industry (what, those chinks can make cars???), which has in many ways begun to utterly dominate both the manufacturing and sales sectors of the Russian car market. Who'd a thunk it? A countermeasure, and a whole new set of unintended consequences to go along with it, and the war carries right on uninterrupted.
If it is, according to the trendy urban legends which social media is best at distributing, 'only a matter of time before Russia collapses', how much time does anyone think residents of Kherson have, for instance, as their recently-liberated city is systematically dismantled by Russian shelling every single day from right across the Dnipro? (I read about that, from yet another Russian-language source doing frontline journalism once again putting its western counterparts to shame, and bothered to translate it from the Russian.)
Enough time for the neo-cold-warriors along the Potomac to finally crawl out from their 1962-vintage bomb shelters and undertake to help Ukraine WIN this war, on Ukraine's terms? This is the very obstacle the Ukrainian state has to navigate every single day in its foreign relations: a growing body count of their own people, while their 'allies' sit around gambling on the effect of sanctions in magically causing the 'collapse' of a nation they are too scared of to just stand up to.
Ukraine is standing up, in a way the USA and NATO never have toward Moscow: toe to toe with the enemy and fighting back with everything they have, and yes, needing more still to get the job DONE. As meanwhile, US-NATO policy-dithering on the questions of arms supplies being determined primarily by some nuclear threat which may or may not even exist from the Kremlin, pretty much amount to a whole other form of sanctions, against Ukraine itself. Are their people expendable too?