Comment by concinds
5 years ago
> "Country X cannot wage war because the economic blowback would destroy them"
Note that a common corollary to that is that countries cannot afford to impose sanctions on others because the economic blowback would destroy them (even sanctions against "smaller" countries, due to how global liquidity works). This is more readily acknowledged by academics, and essentially cancels out the whole theory; but for some reason didn't make it into the trickled-down-for-the-masses version.
If Western leaders apply strong sanctions, it's quite likely we'd go back around 90 years, so you won't be far off!
> essentially cancels out the whole theory
Ish. As a country, when you have 30 economic partners, losing one is not the end of the world; whereas losing 25 of them definitely hurts. Obviously that's more difficult the bigger the partner is (e.g. from an European perspective, sanctioning the US would have a much bigger impact than sactioning Russia), so really it's a question of size and proportion more than anything.
Sanctions have worked so wonderfully well against Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Russia, and North Korea …
And this one is so “important” they’re not even willing to cut the gas pipe that runs through the war zone.