Comment by throw0101d
1 day ago
> 25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like.
Sanctions are a negative-rate compounding system. Sarah Paine from the US Naval War College:
> People look at sanctions and go, “Oh, they don't work because you don't make whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing.” What they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's annoying you over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea. It's powerful over several generations.
And what difference have North Korean sanctions made geopolitically? North and South Korea are nowhere near a peaceful resolution, and North Korea has advanced its nuclear arsenal significantly, with a repertoire that could even hit US coastal cities.
North Korean citizens have now normalized to poverty and destitution after generations of sanctions. There are quite a few of them working alongside the South Asian labour force in the Middle East, engaged in slavish labour that the Gulf nations are often criticized for.
SK has a stronger military than NK and twice the population. Of course a large part of that is internal economic failure due to central planning.
The stronger military doesn't matter when NK has nuclear weapons, which deter any "unification efforts". Sure, South Koreans are doing great, but what difference did sanctions make to the lives of North Koreans?
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