www.zerohedge.com BY TYLER DURDEN
By Thomas Kirchner of Camelot Portfolios
- From substitute for war to forcing domestic policy change.
- Declining success rate of sanctions in the last 25 years.
- Russia sanctions cost West more than Russia.
- World needs a new Vienna Congress
In 433 BC, Athens barred merchants from neighboring Megara from selling their wares in the Athens market. These earliest recorded sanctions didn’t work out too well for the Athenians. The Megarians teamed up with the Spartans to wage the Peloponnesian War, which ended Athens’ golden age [i]. The effectiveness of sanctions has not become much better since antiquity. Famously, sanctions on Iraq and Cuba helped Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro cement their power by allocating scarce imports to their most loyal supporters.
We decided to take a closer look at the Global Sanctions Data Base (GSDB) that is maintained by a team of researchers and spans 1,101 sanctions measures over the period 1950-2019 [ii]. The database does not cover sanctions of the 1920s and 30s, when uncoordinated ad-hoc measures against the axis powers contributed to the collapse of world trade but failed to prevent World War II. After all, following the horrors of World War I, sanctions became the go-to tool for warfare in the 1920s, replacing military conflict through economic warfare. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed in 1919: âA nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender.â [iii] That, at least, was the idea, which has since become religion. As we will discuss, wrongly so.
