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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

Sanctions have never ever in human history worked, so more like sabotaging one's placebos...

The sanctions imposed on South Africa in the 1980s absolutely crippled the country and are widely seen as a successful contribution in the efforts of bringing down Apartheid.

> The sanctions imposed on South Africa in the 1980s absolutely crippled the country and are widely seen as a successful contribution in the efforts of bringing down Apartheid.

They played a role, but Western institutions are biased to exaggerate it and gloss over the fact that the sanctions regimes were only adopted after the reinvigoration of the armed struggle fueled by stepped up material and training support from the USSR brought into serious doubt the survival of the South African regime even with continued active support.

The West didn't want South Africa to lose, and wouldn't concede to it losing until the alternative was it losing anyway and armed struggle and support of the Communist bloc being the entire narrative for why, which they didn't like for either international or domestic political optics.

Sanctions have absolutely wrecked many hostile countries aconomy, crippling their ability to conduct war. There's a reason why North Korea's army is 50s technology held together by duct tape.

Unfortunately, it creates a lot of collateral damage.

It at least worked so far in preventing another Korean war. It didn't topple the Kim regime, but South Korea is mostly safe now.

> It at least worked so far in preventing another Korean war.

It would have to work at coercing a final end to the 1950- Korean War before it could have a chance to succeed or fail at preventing another one.

> In regards to the effectiveness of the sanctions, supporters concede that multilateral sanctions have been found to work 33% of the time.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20034049

Does that matter? If someone tried to sell state secrets to another country and their buyer turned out to be a CIA agent undercover and the secrets were fake info planted for them to sell, they still likely will be prosecuted for treason despite all that.

Unless they faked the information themselves and, instead of conning the Russian government they conned the CIA.

Do you have any sources for this?

Fidel Castro, Kim jong Il, and Vladimir Putin.

Those are the only three instances where sanctions were used "ever in human history"?

Most recent attempts thus most applicable to today’s world. Yes.

The sanctions of the last 8 years have probably played a significant role in diminishing the RF's capacity to effectively occupy Ukraine.

OTOH, Russia successfully elected a POTUS that helped cripple Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

A simple google search shows lots of examples, even recent ones, where sanctions clearly worked.

They're doing great at diminishing NK's industrial capacity, which it is hell-bent on using it to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Having nuclear weapons is the only sure way to prevent someone from “liberating” you through an invasion.

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