| The main flaw of the article is this assumption right here. > "We imagine that the pain these civilians experience will translate into political change—either a change in regime, or a change in regime behavior." The aim of the sanctions is not regime change, but the degradation of the Russian military's ability to wage war. I think the author is observing the current sanctions in the same lens as the sanctions imposed after the occupation of Crimea, where there was a very hand wavy reasoning about integrated deterrence and how the pain of sanctions would make Russia pull out or at least not go forward with further aggression. In my mind there is a very clear distinction in the aim of sanctions before and after beginning of the current Russian offensive, as I said before the aim now is clearly to hinder the offensive, before it was deterrence. I don't believe these particular sanctions are aimed at regime change. Furthermore, as has been noted in the comment section of the article, while the strategic bombing -> low morale/regime change reasoning has been shown false, I think there is a still a lot of room to investigate how much the strategic bombings affected the targets ability to deploy it's forces. It's clear that to achieve victory in the context of the second world war there had to be boots on the ground, but that doesn't mean that the strategic bombing did not contribute. Similarly because sanctions are not enough to achieve the argued final goal (regime change) that doesn't mean they don't have an effect. |
This is addressed directly in the article:
> There are many plausible reasons one might inflict economic harm on an opposing country: [...]. Or they might be kept in place to degrade the Russian economy over the long term, thus frustrating Russian attempts to modernize their military in the decades to come. [...] It is not clear to me which, if any, of these rationales motivate our current sanctions regime.
You write:
> I think there is a still a lot of room to investigate how much the strategic bombings affected the targets ability to deploy it's forces
and the article places some breadcrumbs about that too:
> the collapse imagined by the early air theorists of the ‘30s was possible if the indiscriminate carpet bombing of World War II were replaced by surgical, precision strikes on enemy