To Punish Putin, Economic Sanctions Are Unlikely to Do the Trick
Kim Jong-un was still in college in 2006 when the United Nations Security Council, in a resolution drafted by the United
States, imposed economic sanctions on his father’s regime to stop North Korea from becoming a nuclear power.
If there are members of Congress who believe that the package will change Mr. Putin’s behavior — convince him of the merits of returning Crimea to Ukraine, perhaps, or
persuade him to stop his hacker friends from tinkering with foreign elections — they might be interested in a decommissioned North Korean reactor I have for sale.
And yet one could argue that Mr. Putin hasn’t moved on the Baltics because they are not as critical to Russia as Ukraine, a country through which it pumps 80 percent of the natural gas it sells to Western Europe; which was home to its Black Sea fleet before the move on Crimea;
and which was flirting with moving out of the Russian orbit into the hostile arms of NATO.
But when the goal is ambitious, the economic ties not overwhelming, the target country powerful,
and the target government autocratic — think Russia, Ukraine, hacking — their track record is not particularly good.
When sanctions “have modest objectives and are aimed at countries
that are not terribly powerful but have tasted a little flavor of democracy and have close economic connections to the sanctioning coalition,” Mr. Hufbauer told me, they succeed in changing countries’ behavior about half the time.
Even if sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama in 2014 did not compel Russia to leave Crimea, they add,
without them Mr. Putin might have felt emboldened to send Russian forces across the Baltic republics.