Do Economic Sanctions Work?

Some in Russia, where the price collapse has hit government revenues hard, claim that the US and Saudi Arabia are conspiring to bring Russia to its knees. But that gives US strategists far too much credit. A more likely culprit for the steep price decline is a combination of the shale-energy revolution in the US and the sharp slowdown in Chinese growth. China's slowdown has helped precipitate a broad-based fall in commodity prices that is having a devastating effect on countries like Argentina and Brazil, with which the US authorities presumably have little quarrel.
One of the major reasons economic sanctions have fallen short in the past is that not all countries have complied. Indeed, significant differences of domestic opinion in the imposing country often undermine sanctions as well.
Moreover, countries imposing sanctions must be prepared to address their own vulnerabilities. North Korea is perhaps the most noxious regime in the world today, and one can only hope that its cruel government collapses sometime soon. The Kim regime has clung to power despite being subject to severe economic sanctions, perhaps because China, fearing a united Korea on its border, has not yet been willing to withdraw its support.
Yet it is easy to forget that there are different viewpoints in international relations, even in the most extreme situations. Though North Korea's alleged attack on Sony Pictures' computers has been rightly condemned, it must be admitted that from the perspective of the North Korean elite, their country simply applied economic retaliation much like anyone else does. Sony Pictures had produced a satire poking fun at North Korea's leader, the “Young General” Kim Jong-un. This was an intolerable affront, to which the elite responded with economic sabotage rather than military action.
Let us also not forget that Russia, too, has deployed cyber attacks in the service of foreign-policy goals. Indeed, Russia has far more formidable hackers than North Korea (though much of the top talent currently is employed in mafia rings, rather than in strategic operations).
In a world where nuclear proliferation has rendered global conventional war unthinkable, economic sanctions and sabotage are likely to play a large role in twenty-first-century geopolitics. Rather than preventing conflict, Pericles's sanctions in ancient Greece ultimately helped to trigger the Peloponnesian War. One can only hope that in this century, wiser heads will prevail, and that economic sanctions lead to bargaining, not violence.
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