Great to see sanctions working. Withdraw from Ukraine and sanctions end.
This will be Europe’s first post-War test of security integrity.
My suspicion is it will fail—that Europe as a single force, versus collection of countries crowded on a continent, is an American invention, and without American strength will dissolve divided. But my hope is it will succeed.
I mean yes, we did. Western Europe was unifying under Berlin in the 1940s.
> by convincing Eastern European countries to trust their protective umbrella rather than the French-German domination
Militarily speaking, modern Germany is irrelevant. (Partly due to how it’s been managed post-War.) Especially to Eastern Europe, whose security concerns require a nuclear umbrella.
Trump and conservatives complain mightily about EU underspending on defence, but that's been by American design. While the EU was/is dependent on the American security umbrella, the US had a lot of leverage over Europe. The carrot was "you don't need to spend so much on defence, we've got you covered" and the stick was "shame if we didn't have you covered anymore, since you've been underspending for so many years.
Source on that? No documented cases in history of U.S. sanctions ever ending.
(Which is why from a game theoretic point of view the only winning move is import substitution, not kowtowing to whatever terrorist demands.)
Sanctions on Iran were relaxed in exchange for partial cooperation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_agains...
I would say that Vietnam also shows that economic relations can improve a lot even without a fundamental change in the regime.
China is also an example where economic relations improved.
I don’t see any reason to think that sanctions can’t be lifted. But it may require a complete collapse of Putins regime/party for it to happen on a short timescale. Is there any reason to think USA wouldn’t be willing to open up to a new leadership if they have a radically different attitude and pull out of Ukraine?
If Russia turns into something like North Korea or Iran, then yeah, the outlook is not good. But why should it be?
From a game theoretical point of view: I don’t think any leader of any country wants to end up like North Korea, so the precedent being set is good.
No. None of the sanctions levied against the USSR were lifted and still technically apply to Russia. (Enforcing them is another matter.)
> I don’t think any leader of any country wants to end up like North Korea
North Korea is doing better than South Korea on every metric except "consumer goods availability" and "international relations". Not sure you're making your case here.
> ...or Iran
Iran is more modern, developed and free than any other middle eastern country. (That includes Israel.)
Your ideas are wildly out of sync with actual reality.
This is very, very false and a pretty strong signal there's no useful discussion to have here.
It's a lie. Sanctions actually began to be lifted in 1989 (Jews were finally allowed to emigrate) when we received 80486 processors. In 1990, we got our first SS7 switches and equipment for the first two mobile networks. It was a big thing.
> North Korea is doing better Too bad they are not allowed to tell this here, because internet access is available only to several hundreds people :)
> Iran is more modern, developed and free than any other middle eastern country. (That includes Israel.) Nice joke :)