Kal Raustiala 0:03
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our zoom webinar on "Sanctions: What Everybody Needs to Know". I'm really happy to have as our guest, the author of the book, Bruce Jentleson. Bruce is the William Preston Few Professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, and kind of longtime expert on both American foreign policy, the interactions between academia and foreign policy, someone who's worked in government in many different capacities. So he brings to the book and to the topic of sanctions, both the kind of deep understanding, but also a kind of real practical understanding. So it's a it's a great opportunity to talk about something that's, that's really quite significant at the moment, but has been an important tool of foreign policy around the world for for many decades, if not centuries. So Bruce, welcome.
Bruce Jentleson 0:54
Thanks very much Kal. And thanks to you and your team, for hosting this. It always be good to be out in LA with you all, but but you know, Zoom works well, as well. And I actually want to, you're too modest, but I want to put in a plug for our Kal's new biography onRalph Bunche. Get it on your order list. In fact, interesting person to, to learn about and should be really interesting reading. So kudos to you as well.
Kal Raustiala 1:19
Thanks. Thanks. I'm gonna hand it off to you now and let you introduce the book. And I'll come back on in a bit.
Bruce Jentleson 1:24
That sounds great. So yeah, as Kal was saying, the sanctions is something I've actually worked on a lot through my academic career. I mean, I go back to my doctoral dissertation and first book, which was on Soviet Cold War era, energy pipelines, the friendship oil pipeline in the 1960s, early 60s in the Siberian natural gas pipeline of the early 80s, and so with Nord Stream 2. I sometimes think I've got my personal trilogy of Soviet Russian pipelines and actually started the book in 2020 with a general concern about sanctions and their frequency of use. And obviously, the Russia-Ukraine sanctions have given it much more attention, probably in any case, at least since the South African anti apartheid sanctions in the 1980s. And before I've worked on sanctions, but when in government when I was in the Obama administration, 2009 2011, as Senior Advisor, the Director of Policy Planning, I worked some of the Iran sanctions, way back in the early days of the Bill Clinton-Gore administration. I worked on the China, Tiananmen Square sanctions, and in various other ways over the years, I've had some, you know, policy, you know, experience with it. When the Biden ministration actually did a review of sanctions before this case in spring 2021, you know, was involved in some of that, wrote a memo and did some conversation, as I was writing the review. So let me you know, make, and I shouldn't say by the way, the title of the book, it's a series Oxford has called the "What Everyone Needs to Know" series. And every book has that subtitle, and it does feel a tad arrogant, so at least I can say that it's not everything everybody needs to know, but hopefully, you know, a good portion of it. Let me make four main points just quickly and concisely. In order to move to the rest of the webinar, our conversation with Kal and then some questions from from the other participants. At the first point is the frequency of use of sanctions that even before the Russia-Ukraine sanctions, it was really hard to read the news and not see sanctions being in the news in one form or another with the United States. You know, it's been really, you know, not so much which administration uses them more but administrations may vary about who they use them against and why they use them. Sanctions have been called a Swiss Army knife of American foreign policy that they're used so frequently. But it's not just the US China, which has long been a target of sanctions. And notwithstanding its criticism of sanctions, as Western imperialism has increasingly been using sanctions, a study by an Australian think tank identified 19 cases, from 2010 to 2020. And there have been some since and these don't count, what I refer to in the book as the social media cued sanctions, which are not promulgated by Beijing. But the word goes out to the wolf warriors and social media, for example, the sanctions against the National Basketball Association, when one team executive tweeted support for the Hong Kong protesters back in 2019. It's one of the case studies that's in the book, and particularly interesting. I'm happy to come back to these later on. So the EU uses sanctions a lot. Russia has been using counter sanctions now on energy and natural gas, we'll talk more about as well. The United Nations. which used sanctions four times in its first two decades 1945 to 65, has used them over 40 times since then. The European Union has been using sanctions a great deal as well and even other cases. Japan and South Korea had used sanctions against each other over disputes that go back to the colonial period and to the wartime occupation. There was a tremendous frequency of use. It was part of my motivation for kind of going back to the subject that I'd written a lot on earlier my career and had dealt with here and there over the years. Second point is, you know, in academic terms is is the dependent variable side. How do you assess success? What do we mean by successful sanctions? And here, there's a whole chapter looking at some of these issues is, you know, substantive as well as methodological issues. And a couple points out of that, in terms of how to think about the challenges of assessing success of measuring this dependent variables that were, what is what's really interesting is it's not enough to have superior economic power. In some ways this is like the assumption that if you have superior military power, you would go in wars. Well, that wasn't the case of the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan, and so far has not been the case for Russia and Ukraine. And with sanctions also, it's not enough to have superior economic power ex ante for a number of reasons. And one of the main ones is that the target of the sanctions has a number of counter strategies. One common counter strategy is to find alternative trade partners. Again, there's something in it to this for Cuba. Back during the Cold War, the United States and Western Europe did this for Tito's Yugoslavia when he was hit with sanctions by Stalin. Russia currently has been trying to find alternative trade partners in India for it for its oil with China. Although interestingly, that may be changing a bit given some recent statements by the leaders of those countries. But alternative trade partners in some ways don't necessarily totally take away from the economic impact. But they can squash it to to it to a significant extent. There also are domestic offsets that countries use. Rhodesia, which was really the first major UN sanctions in the 1960s when they did this unilateral declaration of independence. The UN sanctions actually had an infant industry effect. And over the first five, seven, ten years of the sanctions, many number of industries grew in Rhodesia that hadn't been there before. The Russians with the ruble, which originally fell from from 84, to the dollar to 154. The dollar by June was back up to a seven year high. Check today, it's at 61 to the dollars, artificially supported through domestic offsets. But that's the point of the offsets. Russia's also increased retiree pensions that accompany bailouts. And it's a bit of a euphemism. But we can also talk about offsets in terms of arrest and political repression. We've seen that in Russia, we've seen that in other countries. A third strategy is sanctions busting. Again, North Korea, according to UN study, has raised over $2 billion in cryptocurrency as a way of squashing the impact of the UN and Western sanctions. And then the fourth one is counter sanctions. The Russia example is very significant here in terms of the sanctions being imposed against Western Europe, particularly on natural gas. So you really need to sanction, think of sanctions as offense and defense, again, just like you do with military force. What's the offense? And what's the defense? Another point is even when there's substantial economic impact, there's often a gap between the economic impact and the policy compliance. Costs do get imposed, but high economic costs do not necessarily lead to policy change. Think Cuba, over 60 years of sanctions, significant economic impact. Regime is still there. Think North Korea. I think Trump's sanctions on Iran, which had even greater sanctions than the Obama ones, but did not achieve their objectives, regime change and the like. So imposing costs brings some success. But the fundamental goal of sanctions is policy change. And targeted sanctions also are used a lot. We were reading today about sanctions against different individuals in Iran in the light. There's something called a specially designated nationals, SDN list, that the US Treasury maintains. It's over 15,000 individuals and organizations. Some are related to terrorists, some are related to crime and drugs and relate to Russia, Iran and etcetera. So the the notion that the higher the economic cost, the more likely policy change, doesn't really hold up. There's also a question and this gets a little bit in the weeds academically, but how do you count cases. You know, are all of the sanctions say against Cote d'Ivoire, and Africa over many years, or against a Central African Republic, a single case? Or some scholars break those down into episodes when when the scope of sanctions and the objectives change? Again, to use the Russian Ukraine case? I would say we've had at least three different types of sanctions here. We've had the deterrence one. The threat as President Biden said that these would be devastating before the February 24 invasion that failed, and it's not clear that did, Putin was deterrable with his vision of greater rosacea.
But many other cases, sanction used to deter an invasion, have not succeeded. The League of Nations against Mussolini's Italy in the 1930s, who then invaded Ethiopia, Abyssinia. Saddam was saying in 1990, in the invasion of Kuwait. The Soviet Union 1979 and and the invasion of Afghanistan. So the sanctions have as deterrence failed. Once the Russians invaded, the goal was in good Thomas Schelling terms, was compelling. It's, well, again, costs were imposed, but it obviously failed to end the war and get the Russians to, to withdraw. We're in a third phase. Now, I don't want to just mention this now connected at the end, which is sort of any economic war of attrition, the counter sanctions of Russia against the West, and the Western sanctions, really the global sanctions, not totally global with us, but with substantial support. You know, over time trying to break down those Russian defenses, the domestic offsets, the alternative trade partners, and the sanctions busting. The other point, I think, is that oftentimes leaders, the United States, we see this a lot, believe that simply by declaring sanctions, like for human rights purposes, we're sending the message that we stand up for these, or we're sending a message of deterrence, you may not change your behavior. Now, you may not end the invasion, or particular policy, but you won't do it again, down the road, a year or two, along the lines of my offense and defense. You really have to think of sanctions as strategic interaction. You know, the late Robert Jervis always reminded us that the message sent is not necessarily the message received, that are there are perceptions and misperceptions that have happened in strategic interaction. And if the claim is made that we impose sanctions, and that was done for credibility, you really have to ask the question of not just did the sender declare credibility as a show of resolve, but did the target take it that way? Did third parties take it that way? And so all of these elements go into analyzing what we mean by success. The other element is very important is the ethical question. It particularly relates to the sanctions imposed for democracy and human rights. I actually testified a week or two ago to the Congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, named for the now deceased former congressman from California, who himself was a Holocaust survivor, and worked a lot on human rights. And here, there is this real issue of intentions versus consequences. That sanctions imposed because of human rights violations can risk posing a fundamental ethical dilemma of intentions versus consequences if those sanctions actually hurt the people that you're intending to help? How do you weigh that as an ethical question, not just a policy question against your notion? Well, we showed we're standing up for democracy. So all of these issues come in. There's been a lot of good political science and other social science research on this particular question. And it's what I call in my book, the problems of backfiring and misfire. Backfiring entails effects counterproductive to the intended target state policy change, where regime may crack down even more to show that it's going to stand up to external efforts to change. There's an article in the Journal of Peace research a few years ago, that empirically studied 95 countries from 1981 to 2000 and showed how in sanctions, regimes crackdown even more on human rights, including torture and political killings, and then there's misfiring. We actually hit the people, not the regime. And there have been a number of cases where sanctions have worsened life expectancy, infant mortality, child malnutrition, women's health, overall public health, clean water and SAS, sanitation, refugees and internally displaced persons. And one can say, well, you know, it's because the regime didn't, you know, allow any humanitarian aid to reach the people. One of the problems that's happened, Syria is a good example here, where, particularly during the Trump years, where the sanctions and the fines and the threats of prosecution got so extreme that a number of companies, shipping companies, insurance companies, providers of goods, did what they call de risking, where they were worried about even providing the services to NGOs, say up in Northwest Syria that were trying to get aid to on a humanitarian basis to people. But they de risk because they're worried that they would pay a price for this. So there's a fundamental ethical issue that's raised by sanctions here as well. This came up with Afghanistan last winter of the question of lifting the sanctions for humanitarian reasons. I mean, we know the Taliban, were still killing and arresting anyone deemed an opponent. They were oppressing women, they held American prisoners. They had links to international terrorist groups. But as winter set in last year that David Miliband, the former British Foreign Minister, and President of International Rescue Committee, warned, quote, the current humanitarian crisis could kill far more Afghans than in the past 20 years of war. In policy, your jargon, I've tried to do what's called carve outs to get this aid on a humanitarian basis. But sometimes that doesn't work either. So all of these aspects come in to thinking about what we mean by success. One of the proposals that I make in the book, and I've made in conversations with folks in the administration and at the UN, is you need to do a net assessment in two respects. One, you need to credit degrees of success. It can't just be a binaries, can they succeed or fail. They may accomplish some objectives, but not others. But you also need to be sensitive to the notion where sanctions may not just be not working, but may be net negative, because of the backfiring because of the misfiring because of what to, you know, keep this going further across firing and disputes you often get into with allies or costs borne by frontline states - Colombia, in the case of the Venezuelan sanctions, Jordan back during the Iran sanctions. And then of course, sorry, I'm gonna take a little further shooting in the foot, with domestic costs you impose on your own economy. And you really have to have a sense, and you can do that prospectively, as well. As sanctions go along with how does it how what's the net assessment between the likely cost to be imposed, and the policy gains? Because if the sanctions are net negative, this notion that they're well, we don't want to use military force, we use them as a default option, it actually may crowd out and I know from my own experience in the policy world, may crowd out other policy options that may be there. And maybe even if they don't work, may not be net negative. Let me just talk for a second now about the independent variable side. What are the keys to success? And here I work with, again, coming out of literature and policy case studies, five main factors that don't guarantee success, but help close that gap between economic impact and policy compliance. The first is multilateral support. Now, I have to say there are numerous problems with UN sanctions, including both a will and capacity to enforce them. And so they've actually had a very mixed record of their own, in part dependent on a number of other factors. But the more multilateral support you have, the more you are eliminating alternative trade partners. So the greater that support, that's an important factor. And the rest of Ukraine case, those are not UN authorized, for obvious reasons in terms of the Russian veto and Security Council. But what we've had here is many countries cooperating. Just to give two examples, Switzerland, which rarely cooperates with sanctions, has cooperated to a great extent with the financial sanctions. Singapore, which has never before cooperated with any sanctions that are not, unauthorized, has also been cooperating with us. So there's been a significant degree, if not total multilateral support with the with the Russia Ukraine sanctions, even though they're not authorized by the UN. Second is a notion of proportionality. Sanctions are a limited instrument. And they're more likely to be effective when they pursue limited objectives, in which the balance of interest is not so much that the interests of the target in resisting are so much greater than the interest of the senders in getting compliance. There are a number of cases where sanctions have worked for limited policy change, some human rights reform some democracy promotion. Use a Chinese example. They oppose sanctions against Norway, when Liu Xiaobo got the Nobel Peace Prize, and they didn't get the peace prize to be rescinded. But they did get Norway to compromise on some other issues. So they didn't get their main objective, but they got limited policy change. Or against France when President Sarkozy met with the Dalai Lama. He went ahead with that. But after that, many countries started refusing to meet directly, at least heads of state, with the Dalai Lama. So the proportionality, limited objectives. The notion of ending a war, deterring a war is not a limited objective, is one of the reasons why sanctions have had significant problems in achieving that. Third factor is reciprocity. No country says Uncle to sanctions. You know, I wrote another piece we can circulate as well, a couple months ago, about "Who's Winning the Sanctions War?" in foreignpolicy.com. Because there's a there's a study that's conducted by Yale Business School, which has been very helpful in the sense of identifying the number of companies, American and international, that have actually been self sanctioning with the sanctions. But the conclusion of those during the study was that we were driving the Russians into economic oblivion. You know, catastrophic, doesn't happen. Ultimately, with sanctions, there needs to be the goal is to strengthen your hand for diplomacy and leverage. And here, I'll make the point between the Obama Iran sanctions and the Trump Iran sanctions. As I said before, the Trump Iran sanctions, what's called maximum pressure, did even more damage to the Iranian economy than the Obama sanctions did. But there was no reciprocity there. And there was no proportionality of objective, was all about regime change. There was sanctions, which, as we recall, had the cooperation of Russia and China and others, had significant pressure on the Iranian regime economically, but had a limited objective of changing a nuclear of getting a nuclear non proliferation policy out of it. And the inducement was, if you do this, we'll lift these sanctions, which is worth reminding us that, you know, by most accounts, including Israeli intelligence, the sanctions were working reasonably well before Trump backed out of them. So the Obama sanctions had both proportionality reciprocity that Trump's sanctions hadn't either. Part of the issue here for the US is you need to have clarity and consistency about the criteria for lifting. Congress recently, for example, tried to put Russia on the state supporters of terrorism list, and the Biden folks resisted, because once sanctions are imposed through congressional legislation, to lift them, you need to undo that legislation. If they're done by executive discretion, executive order and the like, then its negotiating leverage for executive. So reciprocity is a very important factor here in the in the success. Last two factors are, you really are targeting the domestic politics of that country. And I talk about, you know, the role of different kinds of elites. And this is very true in non democracies, not just democracies to power brokers, either actors, transmission belts or circuit breakers, to the extent that their interests are consistent with the regime, resisting the policy change. They are circuit breakers. They break the circuit of the economic pressure coming in, to the extent that their interests are better served by changing the policy. They can become transmission belts bringing the pressure into the regime. This is part of the question about Russia. Some of the oligarchs crack, they are Yeltsin era oligarchs, and don't have much influence here. But, you know, the Libya sanctions, I can come back to this later, I don't want to take too much time, but back in 2003, where the United States and Britain use sanctions negotiations to get Gaddafi to end his WMD programs to make some concessions on some crucial terrorism cases. And the sanctions were there for a long time. Part of what was happening in Libya, certain groups were shifting from circuit breakers to transmission belts and bringing more pressure, pressure on that on that regime. So the domestic politics ultimately play in the last point, and this will lead us back to Russia, is sort of companion policies. And the rest of Ukraine case we have sanctions combined with military strategy. If the Ukrainian resistance had not been as courageous and effective as it has been, and if the US NATO support, financial and in terms of weapons had not been, then we wouldn't be talking about sanctions impact. This war would be over. But I think the most significant thing about the sanctions, and one of the reasons why while they failed in deterrence and feels compelled as the jury's still out, is that they're directly hitting the military capabilities of the Russians. They're squeezing the economy, but that's an indirect effect. So that the I think the figure now is up to five or 6000 pieces of heavy equipment have been lost. And the semiconductor sanctions have been pushing the Russians to actually MacGyver semiconductors out of refrigerators and dishwashers and the like. And so to the extent that those are directly hitting military capabilities, they're reinforcing the military strategy, not yet decisive, and we don't know if there'll be decisive because ultimately, this may be a military question. But that's very different. Where your goal there is not so much to change the policy indirectly, through economic pressure economic squeeze, but is to hit the military capabilities and reduce their capabilities. And so that puts us in this economic war of attrition where the Russians are trying to break Western resistance, particularly through the natural gas sanctions against Europe at a time where inflation is running even higher in Europe. Recession is there there are major plants and like that have already had to close down because of our cut back because of gas shortages. We in America that have been obviously very concerned about the price of gasoline, when you start to think about home heat rationing in the winter. And so we're not sure yet where this ends up in terms of economic war attrition, to the extent that there is a negotiated settlement as my last point, which brings you back to the reciprocity there needs to be thinking about. And I don't think this letter from progressive Democrats got there the right kind of way, but there has to be thinking about, you know, what is the diplomacy here? What sanctions would be lifted for what moves on the Russians part in terms of ending this war? Because that ultimately, if the war is going to end, that's, that's going to be the fundamental question. So I'm gonna stop there. In the interest of time, we can come back to a lot of this, but I wanted to try to give you a sense of both sort of the general arguments and something specific to the rescue crankcase.
Kal Raustiala 26:00
Great, great. Thanks, Bruce. So as promised you and I will, we'll just chat a little bit, I'll pose a few questions. And then we'll go to audience questions of what they're already many. So there's so many dimensions to to this book. And I really want to recommend it. Bruce is right that this series can sound maybe arrogant. But they're very concise. And in Bruce's case, this book is quite quite concise. He packs a lot into not that many pages. So it's a really good primer on the issues. So let me just start with, you know, just maybe asking you what you see, let me back up. It seems like sanctions are often viewed as a very attractive option, but one that sort of never quite or rarely meets our expectations. And that's a kind of through line in the book. You debate that point. And I think rightly point out that even deciding what is the case as you reverted to earlier in this presentation can be complicated. The literature on this, the research is a bit conflicting about how successful sanctions are. But nonetheless, we keep going back to them. So I guess I want to ask two questions. One is, what's the political dynamic that you see? And maybe you can draw on your experience in government what makes sanctions so attractive? I have some intuitions about that. And then to what's the paradigmatic example of a successful sanction? So are there cases that continually crop up? I'm guessing South Africa, perhaps. But what are the cases that come to mind when people debate these issues? And then how does it, how does the dynamic play out? When, let's say, for the US government, the US decides we're going to lead with sanctions?
Bruce Jentleson 27:38
Yeah, and the political part Kal, you know, it's very much this don't just stand there, do something, right? Looks tough, you know. You don't want to be trading with the bad guy. And it's not so much that you should continue economic relations. But oftentimes, they're turned to as this default option, A without the net assessment about whether there'll be net negative. And you really need to care about that, from a policy perspective, whether it's, you know, you genuinely care about human rights or not, or even, you know, from from other kinds of policy objectives. And B, it kind of crowds out other kinds of, you know, kinds of thinking, you know. And policy strategies are there, it's just this quick turn to them. And, you know, it can be a wasting asset too. The financial sanctions have been really interesting. We've, you know, you know, the weaponization of interdependence through the financial sanctions. But a lot of warnings there about, you know, while the dollar will never be fully replaced, you know. This happened during the Trump sanctions with the Europeans trying to find ways around, around the dollar. And is this continual turn to financial sanctions, a wasting asset? You know, part of that as you get into, this is right up your alley, secondary sanctions, which raise issues about the extraterritorial application of American policy. You know, the book I wrote about the West Siberian natural gas pipeline, you know, Margaret Thatcher, who agreed with you that everything Ronald Reagan did, fundamentally opposed him on those Siberian natural gas pipeline sanctions, not so much for the gas, but for the steel pipe contracts that the British had. Let's recall the recession of the early 1980s. So this whole notion of really sitting back and, you know, even if you say, look, I know they're going to be net negative, but I still want to do them, I'd actually be happier with that, you know, then just this this default option automatic reaching for them. Because I think sometimes you'll actually, okay, let's look for a better policy. You know, in terms of examples, so South Africa is, in some ways, an iconic case. But if you had done an evaluation of South Africa and sanctions in the early 1980s, and the US wasn't imposing them but much of the world was for over 15 years, you were said they fail, right? And in 1986, Congress passed the Anti Apartheid Act sanctions. And, you know, universities, I was teaching at University of California Davis then. I was on faculty there. And I remember, you know, student protests and efforts by the regents and the state of California to divest from companies and the pension funds that were doing business. Congress passed this Anti Apartheid sanctions bill passed by a Republican Senate. Vetoed by President Reagan. And I know this is gonna sound really weird, but the veto was overridden by Republican Senate. And at the same time bank, Citibank, was not rolling over loans, because it was a financial risk. The sports sanctions were beginning to end, we've had those with Russia too, the banning from World Rugby and World Cricket, we're beginning to make Afrikaners feel like it was really affecting them. So you had, you know, a number of factors that came together. And one has to ask, how unique were those factors? And they were, they were fairly unique. We may want to talk about Russia versus Taiwan later, because that's come up a lot. The other, another example, though, is the number of the late 70s Carter administration, congressional activism and human rights sanctions against Latin American governments hitting American military aid, you know, cause some of those policies to change somewhat, contributed by the early 1980s. Reagan Administration sort of continue this in their own way to, you know, Argentina and Chile, and ultimately, Brazil and their military regime. So you had a limited objective there. You weren't trying to do regime change, you're trying to get them to do some democracy reform. So, so those are a couple examples.
Kal Raustiala 31:28
Great, great. I want to talk about the, you mentioned just now kind of you don't want to trade with the bad guy. And you have a section in the book on the ethics of sanctions, and you mentioned that today, as well, which I think is a really interesting issue. So you know, there are people who view sanctions as, you know, sort of the the less violent equivalent of, you know, carpet bombing a city or something. And that you're going after, it's not a military target, it's not targeted at the regime, often, though you talk about ways in which sanctions can be made to be more targeted. But oftentimes, they have really detrimental effects on what could fairly be described as innocent people. So you know, just expand a little bit on how we ought to think about that issue.
Bruce Jentleson 32:13
Yeah, I think that, you know, very much, you know, this is part of the of the net assessment, you know, to claim that you're doing things because you believe in the values of human rights. But if they're net negative, and again, a lot of data and evidence and analysis about the backfiring and misfiring is there. There have been efforts to do targeted sanctions. The UN switched to targeted sanctions after the experience in Iraq in the 90s and Serbia. Targeted sanctions don't stay that targeted, you know, you know. Bad guys' regimes find ways to insulate themselves from it. The effects hit the the rest of, rest of the populace and stuff. And that's where I think we really need to be, you know, more, you know, more thoughtful and more straightforward and think about what else can we do. You know, I mean, you know, you can give a speech that says, you know, we're limiting trade, particularly in areas that affect the repressive capacity of those regimes. And we're doing a bunch of other things. We're doing a little information warfare, we're trying to help, you know, we're not going to tell you how, because it's quiet, you know, the opposition, and the like. Some of this is happening now in Myanmar, you know, for example. But, you know, the sort of the, and again, you know, it's easy to grandstand on this, you know. Whether you're in Congress, you know, talking before about David Matthew's classic work on Congress, he talked about credit claiming versus blame avoidance and regimes and administration's do this, too. But, you know, if it's, if you get away from thinking it's a two option only world, either bomb or sanction, and you really try to think through other options, you have a chance of coming, coming up with options. And they're a way to convey that we're, we're doing what we need to do. We're being tough. But you know, we don't want to do something that's counterproductive. And when you can write that speech, you know.
Kal Raustiala 34:01
Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Well, I'm sure we'll circle back on that a little bit. Let's pivot to the issue that's obviously on probably everyone's mind. And you, you do address a bit in the book, though, the timing of your book made it hard to really dive into this situation with Russia and Ukraine. But how would you characterize the current set of sanctions in terms of, are they, in fact, the most comprehensive, the most intense that we've seen the broadest base? What, what else is sort of worthy of note and then how effective do you think they've been so far?
Bruce Jentleson 34:32
Yeah, I think that the, the ability in the first four, six months to contain the costs through those domestic offset measures reduced the impact. You know, raising retiree pensions, bailing out companies, artificially supporting, doing capital controls that are artificially supporting the exchange rate, you know, help that. But, you know, on the one hand, you can't just say well, we just got to get sanctions time. We have been doing that in Cuba for 60 years, right. But I think that the capacity, you know, even the Russian head of the Central Bank has kind of alluded to this in some of her statements. If the ability to resist them, combined with, you know, the pushback Putin is getting at home from the draft, from body bags coming home, are making it harder for him to say it's a special military operation and, you know, the world is mad at me, but you guys don't worry. And so I do think that there is sustainability there. Again, I really feel like when we overestimate that, we get back into this superior economic power, you know, is decisive and it isn't. So I really been pushing back about that and saying yes, it's increasing leverage. The alternative trade partners is really interesting, right. So, India increased its imports of Russian oil from 2% of his imports to 20% because it was getting it at a discount, it was refining it, including reselling the refined products, right. China has not done anything close to the proclamation of a partnership with no limits that Putin and Xi Jinping did on the eve of the Olympics. You know, it has had some trade. It's been a little concerned about secondary Sark sanctions against American and European companies if it goes too far. It's very striking at that recent summit that Prime Minister Modi came out directly to Putin and said, "this is not the way the world should be." And Xi Jinping apparently sent the same message, you know, because the, you know, the may agree and the rhetoric is still there about Western elites and not accepting multipolarity, and all that sort of thing. It doesn't mean India, you know, India has a strong relationship with Russia, it's a major supplier of their military aid. You know, in part of I think is maybe one of these people can, you know, can be an intermediary towards diplomacy that the Russians might want to do with the US or Europe. So the alternative trade partner has been there. But I'm not convinced it's going to be as valuable over time, and to continue to hit the military capabilities, you know. Now, the risk here, of course, is the escalation risk, who is losing and it goes to escalation, we have to deal with that as well. But I actually am feeling like the sanctions, because of their scope, and you know, that they have a chance, again, combined with the military strategy of helping get us to some potential diplomatic resolution of this.
Kal Raustiala 37:41
Great, great. Okay, so I'm going to go to audience questions. We have about 20 minutes left, and there's quite a few good questions. So, so let me start with, with this one. So the question reads, in your 1986 book, Pipeline Politics, you focused on energy sanctions imposed in the 60s in the 80s. You referenced this earlier, what are the major differences in the way that sanctions, energy sanctions, have been imposed today contrasted to the earlier cases you analyzed? So, what's changed about how we deal with energy?
Bruce Jentleson 38:11
Yeah, it's interesting, you know, that was the early 60s where there was greater reliance of Italy and Germany on Russian oil. And, and the the leverage we had of our allies, then, there was a speech given by the German foreign minister who said, you know, I'd really like to help my steel pipe companies, but dependent on the United States, right. And you don't get those kinds of speeches anymore, you're getting cooperation for their own reasons. You know, the Europeans turn more to Russia as a supplier coming out of the 70s. You know, the unreliability of Middle Eastern suppliers, low price, the ease of pipeline supply, and they got too dependent. I mean, it's a basic rule of energy politics, right, you diversify your portfolio, both by source and supplier. And they got too dependent. My own view is, you know, again, if this war gets resolved, and we spend the next three, five years sorting out the relationship between the West and Russia, longer, maybe, you know, projections of no energy coming from Russia, I don't think it's going to happen. But I do think the lesson there is, you know, over reliance, you know, for Germany and for others. So the EU has some energy sharing agreements that they've made, you know, across the EU. There are a lot of loopholes in it. We'll see what happens, you know, when when the need is there. I could imagine the Nord Stream pipelines functioning again at some future point. But it became excessive dependence. And in the early 80s, it was, you know, that they thought it ended. Soviets invaded Afghanistan, you know, this was very new Cold War for Reagan, in any relationship, but Reagan actually didn't succeed. Reagan actually had to concede on that, you know, and that was the contrast that the Kennedy administration was able to get the Europeans to step back. But the Reagan administration had to concede on those sanctions, basically trading it for cooperation on, you know, some of the arms control issues of the day as he began to be the shifts in the line today. I think we're all on the same page overall, because of the nature of this threat in an invasion of you know, it's an interstate war. It's in Europe, you don't have to make comparisons to Hitler to say that there are atrocities happening there. And so this is like the most basic security threat for the Europeans. It's not just the Americans coming over and saying, hey, guys, I want to convince you this is a security threat.
Kal Raustiala 40:38
Great. Great. So next question, kind of, I think implicitly references something you said earlier about. What if you had two choices? Or we basically have two choices of military or, or economic tools? So the question is, if not sanctions, what alternatives do states have to signal their disapproval of another state's behavior? What would you recommend to political leaders? So this is something that you probably experienced in your time at the State Department? What what are the other, maybe not just what are the alternatives, but what are the good alternatives?
Bruce Jentleson 41:07
Yeah, so let me talk about, you know, a tough case China in the Uyghurs, right. Declared genocide as by the US by many others in the international system. And so sanctions have been imposed by the US to certain extent by the European Union. And, you know, personal reactions, the private sector, those are really interesting company. Swedish retailer, H&M, and Intel, American semiconductor producer, are both cooperating pretty strongly with the Russia Ukraine sanctions. On the weaker sections, they both gonna have been going around them. And, and so the ability to impose significant economic impact has been limited. You know, I think there, you know, again, those sanctions that most significantly affect the Chinese capacity to be repressive, technology sanctions, and you're more apt to get a degree of multilateral cooperation, if you limit it to certain areas. And then, you know, information, you know, you know, various kinds of the information warfare, you know, efforts to put pressure on China in a variety of other ways. When many of our your Asian allies are not cooperating with these, what's the message here? Right? Is the message really one of resolve and credibility? Or is it you can't even get your allies to do this. So those are some options, you know, limited sanctions targeted specifically at the capabilities that are most offensive, rather than a general notion of economic pressure. Find other ways to bring pressure, you know. There's probably some things you can do as cyber that's beyond my, you know, my expertise. They don't necessarily bring retaliation, although we do have the Chinese doing it to us anyway. In some respects, I would look for ways like that, where you're willing to say, I'm going to do things that I think are most effective, because I think that's the best way to, you know, make these, you know, not be net negative.
Kal Raustiala 41:08
Let me just ask an elaboration of that. So if there were, let's not assume necessarily an invasion of Taiwan, but perhaps a blockade or something, kind of something slightly less than a than a full invasion, but with a clear aim of strangling and absorbing Taiwan, are there any sanctions that you see against China, that would be realistic, either as a political matter that they would actually happen, or that they would actually be effective?
Bruce Jentleson 43:32
They would definitely happen. Right. I don't think it'd be effective. I think I think it's really interesting, because we're talking about the Russia case, and all the factors that have gone into making this possible effect, you know, interstate war, you know, in your, you know, atrocities, you know, risk of escalation. You know, we can debate this, but Taiwan is fundamentally an interest state issue, right? And so your your reach for international legitimacy, while you claim it, won't be as strong whether it's an invasion or a blockade or anything. Secondly, is the economic interest at hand. I mean, just using the examples I use before about the Uyghurs, you're not going to get the extent of cooperation from from from global companies that you're getting. And third is the degree of global support. I mean, it was very interesting after Speaker Pelosi his visit to Taiwan, the new president of South Korea, conservative, refused to meet with her when she came to Seoul. He was on staycation. And that's an indication, I know, I've spent a lot of time in Australia, and the Australians are concerned about China, but they're also concerned about the Americans escalating. So you would do some but I think that you know, the, the notion that you can rely on this strategically needs to be disabused as you figure out what your policy options are. Again, even if you say you're imposing sanctions, and you do You know, maybe because you feel a political pressure, but understand in that meeting room, that this is not going to be a major lever, what other levers do you need to reach for?
Kal Raustiala 45:11
Great. Okay, next question. Biden administration ordered a review of sanctions last year, but it doesn't seem to have led to any serious reforms to address the shortcomings, negative impacts, you outline. So well, at this stage, is there just too high a political cost of reforming sanctions, at least in the US, absent the collapse of governments we're targeting? Are there any realistic pathways to refine US sanctions, given how deeply embedded they are within our foreign policy toolkit?
Bruce Jentleson 45:38
Yeah, I think the the reform review made some measures. I mean, they were beginning to look at the notion of financial sanctions as a wasting asset and trying to, you know, if you look at their report that recommended for credit, putting some of this net assessment kind of a calculation at the front end, and as you continue to do sanctions. You know, there's it was interesting. So this congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, which is chaired by Congressman Jim McGovern, from Massachusetts, Democrat, and Chris Smith, Republican, New Jersey are the two main things. The reason Congressman McGovern had this hearing a couple weeks ago, and had me and a couple of others, including a European experts actually testify is he's really concerned about the backfire and misfire, right, and ways in which as a believer in human rights, he really wonders when we're doing this. The Venezuelan sanctions, you know, you have in different studies done, and a significant number of aspects of the humanitarian suffering and deaths have been attributed to the sanctions, right. You know, within negotiate, you know, if you had done more limited sanctions, or even use the example of Cuba, where, in the early 2010s, Spain, negotiated with the Castro government, through the Catholic Church, and got the release, I think number was 62 political prisoners, for a limited lifting of sanctions, right. Didn't totally solve the issues of Cuba. But it's more progress than we've made by just doing it kind of all or nothing. Right. So there are different ways of going about it. In terms of, you know, you know, what's the proportionality of your objectives? What kind of sanction do you use, and being conscious that, you know, if we really care about human rights, we need to make sure we don't do more damage than then ahs otherwise been done?
Kal Raustiala 47:32
Yeah, that sounds like a serious issue. And one that's not that easy to, to assess. Let me just ask you about Cuba. You mentioned Cuba a couple of times. Yu know, 60 plus years at this point, should we end the Cuban sanctions?
Bruce Jentleson 47:44
Yeah, I definitely mean, I think, you know, again, you know, like Obama in Iran, you don't stay in all of them, but we should be much more in, you know. Biden's very cautious in this the ASEAN and go back to Obama policies got a lot of us played. I was there in 2012. You know, during the Obama opening, and, you know, one of the things I saw I know, a lot of American comes to tell you is, you know, the Europeans and Canadians, you know, getting the hotels and getting the inroads and, you know, it's not that you'd sell your soul just for an exporter or investment profit. And it's not so much that the Cuban regime uses these as a rationale that may have worked with different generations. I don't think it works with three generations after the revolution. But you know, they're not, they're not achieving any political objectives. And that's a good example where the limitations are partly, you know, congressionally imposed, you know, on you'd have to get legislation and, you know, that's pretty hard to do. But, you know, so I think that I understand why Biden's dealing with it was everything that was played. But I think Obama was on the right track when he was doing that. And I know, you've got Ben Rhodes coming tonight, might ask him because he was central to, to that whole negotiation.
Kal Raustiala 49:05
Great, great. So next question, given the cost and potential backfire of placing sanctions, how might we judge the efficacy of the threat of placing sanctions towards achieving policy compliance. Under what conditions does the threat of sanctions achieve the intended result?
Bruce Jentleson 49:19
So my good friend and colleague Dan Drezner, who writes a lot about sanctions, wrote an article a number of years ago called "The Hidden Hand of Economic Coercion". And he argued there there's sometimes the threat of sanctions, achieves its objective without sanctions having been opposed, and it gets into how do you count cases, and there are a couple of databases that take this into account. There are two issues there. One is how do you define a threat, right? Is it that somebody in Congress gives a speech or does a tweet? Or is it you know, sent through a diplomatic channel? And Dan had some good examples back then. And secondly, because back to what you know, it's more likely to work when it has limited objectives, right. And so the Biden threat of devastating and that language was used by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to Secretary of State Tony Blinken. It didn't have a deterrent effect. And again, whether Putin was deterrable, may not have been. But that's where when you look at other cases, you know, the type of sanctions when aggressors have, you know, seen their interests as launching a war, has a very poor track record, whether it's the League of Nations and Mussolini or the other cases I cited. So it really comes back to those other factors, proportionality. In some ways, the reciprocity is not imposing them, right. So they can be a tool like that, but in the Ukraine case, didn't work.
Kal Raustiala 50:47
So next question, as sanctions are becoming increasingly common, and I'll just bracket as a sub question, are they in fact becoming increasingly common? So that's something you can maybe addres. I can't recall what you say in the book. But as they're becoming increasingly common, and countries are trying to limit their impact, how do you foresee the global economy and supply chains changing? What industries and countries will movement be most likely to occur? And so in other words, how does the global economy kind of react to the imposition of sanctions? Interesting question.
Bruce Jentleson 51:14
Yeah, you know, they have become more common, you know, and including that, you know, especially designated nationals list, you know, the numbers and Biden are higher than Trump were higher than Obama were higher than Bush. We have sanctions, the specific sanctions against countries over 30 countries now. We have things like the Magnitsky Act, which allows you to, and some of the anti terrorism legislation to impose so it's even hard to count how many there are. And again, China has been using them much more frequently, as their economic position has increased. They just most recently imposed them against Lithuania, for opening an office for Taiwan, in the capital, imposed against Australia, by the way, they didn't work against Australia, you know. They they they imposed against Australia, because the prime minister had called for a WHO investigation of the origins of COVID, and also the Australia crackdown on Chinese interference in their domestic politics. Just to throw out a number of the $4 billion in in trade Australia had, they got alternative partners for about 3.3. So there was some effect, but not that much. And China didn't cut off iron or or wool, because they needed that for their industry. So anyway, that kind of goes off the, you know, the question you had, I think that the financial sanctions are debated a lot. And somebody said, you know, the, the concerns about the dollar declining is a little bit like the prediction of nine of the last five recessions. But there are, you know, again, it will always be a significant currency. But there's more trade being done by dark barter, the Chinese are developing, you know, a currency. They're not ready to make the renminbi central. So you know, and when you say that they're credible, it's like, oh, yeah, sanctions again, right. So I think that's part of the part of the issue here is using more strategically. So when you say you really mean them, and you think you have a shot at making them net positive? That's more credible.
Kal Raustiala 53:08
Okay, great. So so next question. Overall, you seem to opine that sanctions generally do not work, do not accomplish their stated goals, can make the situation worse, etc. Maybe that's a slight overstatement of your position, but there's some truth there. Why then the apparent infatuation with them? They're increasing and have expanded use. And this you've I think, already answered, are they seen as doing something alternatives as an alternative to war? So you sort of answered that second part, that is a big part of their political appeal. But do you see the infatuation with them as growing? And if so how does how do you square that with their their actual empirical record?
Bruce Jentleson 53:47
Yeah, some of the databases give like 30% effectiveness 20, 40. And again, sometimes, you know, there's a really good book written by David Baldwin, who was a Columbia emeritus professor, about the ways we underestimate the impact by not looking at differentiated objectives. And I tried to go but let me come come back to the part of your question that I didn't answer about global supply chains here. Actually, the motivation for that, in the China case, there's some concern, not just sanctions, but the general just instability of the relationship, right. That's causing some reconsideration as well as other countries providing attractive, more attractive or competitively attractive, low cost labor, right, whether it's Vietnam or Mozambique, or, you know, Bangladesh to a certain extent. And I think that reshoring, you know, certain kinds of strategic supply chains, you know, away from the Japanese, you know, just in time model has a lot of motivations. I don't think sanctions is is the main one. In terms of that, but I don't think it's as discussion about what's the term, decoupling of US, China, you know, I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're kind of like I said about energy and Western Europe and Russia are going to recalibrate what's the optimal balance point. And I think that's we're doing in our relations with China. But, you know, all this rhetoric about decoupling. You know, again, it's, you know, it's a little bit of the bombast that I wrote another piece called, you know, "Be Wary of the China Threat Inflation" because we tend to inflate threats, you know, in our in our politics and policy.
Kal Raustiala 55:22
Great, well, so we're almost at the end of our hour. So I want to just thank you, Bruce, for coming on. I want to know to everyone tuning in that in the chat we have a link to the book at the Oxford website, which includes a 30% off discount. So feel free to to buy directly from Oxford at a discount and Bruce, thanks for coming on. I hope we can have you back.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai