I saw a tweet storm that, alas, I can no longer find, asking, seriously, what is the point of sanctions. The immediate question was addressed to Trump, but it applies just as well to US policy makers as a whole.
The author likens sanctions to toilet training a dog. If you want to toilet train a dog, you smack it with a rolled-up newspaper when it pees on the floor. If it goes outside, you do not smack it with a rolled up newspaper. If you respond to the dog going outside by smacking it even harder to show how tough you are, you remove all incentive for the dog to become toilet trained, since the beatings are the same (or worse) regardless of what it does.
This obvious lesson somehow escapes the attention of the Blob when it comes to sanctions. A hostile foreign country engages in some noxious behavior. We respond by slapping on sanctions. The power then responds by ceasing from the behavior that led to the sanctions. But the Blob gravely warns that to remove sanctions would be a show of weakness, so we must continue the sanctions or even intensify them. We make clear to the foreign government that no change in behavior on its part will be met by a favorable response from us. And then we wonder why the foreign power doesn't change its behavior and conclude it is just proof of how unreasonable that country is.
Of course, ultimately behavior change is not the real point of sanctions. The real point is two-fold.
In their milder form, sanctions are a way of expressing disapproval. Once in place, even if the objectionable behavior ends, we can never remove them because to remove sanctions might be taken as an expression of approval. So sanctions remain endlessly in place, even if they serve no purpose whatever, because to end the sanctions is to give up our self-righteous indignation. See Cuba. I suppose the equivalent would be smacking you dog with a rolled-up newspaper all the time because you dislike the dog regardless of its behavior. Not very useful for behavior modification though.
But very often the real purpose of sanctions is regime change. This is even worse than imposing sanctions as a statement of disapproval. It amounts to issuing an ultimatum to a foreign government, "If you don't drop dead, we will kill you." Oddly enough, this ultimatum never produces a favorable response. Still more oddly, our government never seems to understand why. While sanctions as a statement give no real incentive for anything and leave the hostile power free to do as it pleases since our response will be the same regardless, attempts at regime change invariably convince foreign leaders of the need to oppose us at all costs and never show any weakness.
The equivalent would be if you decide the dog has so many bad habits that you will never cure all of them, so you decide to kill the dog instead. Needless to say, if you really want to kill the dog, something a lot stronger than a rolled-up newspaper would be more effective. But you have any number of household members/neighbors who do not agree with your goal of killing the dog and so you keep insisting that you are not trying to kill the dog, but merely to toilet train it and that is why you are only beating it with a rolled-up newspaper. You are not able to give a coherent account of why you beat the dog harder and harder regardless of what it does. If you have other household member/neighbors who do agree with the goal of killing the dog, you tell them that are attempting to kill the dog. You are not able to give a coherent account of why you never use anything stronger than a rolled-up newspaper. Neither group trusts you much.
But their distrust is nothing compared to the dog's. Because, oddly enough, if you try to beat a dog to death with a rolled-up newspaper, the dog is most unlikely to passively submit. If the beatings become truly menacing, it may start doing something like violently resist or bite you. Naturally, you take this as proof of how wicked the dog is and how much it deserves to die. Even if you do succeed in beating the dog to death with a newspaper, it will only be at the cost of considerable injury to yourself.
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