(The New York Times) (Co-authored with Bernard Sucher) The American government tends to see sanctions against Russia as a low-cost policy that will eventually force Vladimir Putin to change course in Ukraine.
But this conventional wisdom obscures significant costs. Just as using drones to target suspected terrorists in Pakistan may have created more converts to Islamic militancy than it has eliminated, sanctions advocates haven’t reckoned with the unintended consequences of the policy — consequences that could prove far more damaging to American interests than the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine.
First, by employing commercial and financial sanctions on Russia for its actions in Ukraine, the United States — the architect and largest beneficiary of the globalized system of trade and finance — is exploiting post-Soviet Russia’s integration into that system. Years of mutually beneficial progress that brought 140 million Russians into the orbit of global economic governance are now in doubt. Even if sanctions succeed in changing the Kremlin’s behavior and are then lifted, the American objective of integrating Russia into the global economy has been fundamentally undermined. […]
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