I agree with Prof. Schnall. When evaluating sanctions, there are 3 questions to ask: 1. Will this degrade the war-making potential of Russia (short or long term.) 2. Will this increase likelihood Russian leadership stops the war? 3. Does this hurt those responsible for the war?
Bans on submission to academic journals fail all 3 tests. As do kicking out Russian students in the West (I guess a case could be made for degrading Russian war fighting potential in the very, very long term, but I don’t think that’s enough.)
Bans on Russian participation in Eurovision and sporting events are iffy for me. They clearly don’t meet the 1st criteria (unless you want to claim that not seeing Russia in Eurovision hurts the morale of R soldiers) nor the 3rd (unless Putin is a big sports fan.)
The case for these sanctions rest on the 2nd: does isolating Russia culturally increase the chances that Putin is ousted from power by either popular revolt or a palace coup? I don’t know the answer to that question.
However, these types of sanctions have minimal material cost to the broader Russian population, so I think the threshold for the benefits of the sanctions is rather low.
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To my new followers: glad to have y’all here! But the thread that brought you here is only partially representative of my feed. I do tweet about foreign policy but mostly focus on trade & economic policy. I also tweet about American politics, academia, UM sports, and Popcorn.
I’m pretty left of center when it comes to domestic politics, have been a liberal interventionist on foreign policy but am growing increasingly skeptical of military intervention, enjoy mockery and sarcasm in my tweeting, and, I might have mentioned, posting about my cat, Popcorn
Anyway, welcome! If you want a good overview on my research and arguments on trade policy, you can also buy my book:
I read the Mearsheimer interview (I was bored during office hours and decided increased blood pressure was just what I needed to relieve the boredom.) Some takes: 1. The line about great power politics and not imperialism is just as dumb in context.
2. M is committed to idea that NATO/EU is in lockstep. This is both for intellectual consistency (IOs in his worldview are tools for the state that reflect power of states and not actors in their own right; since both NATO/EU are Western IOs, they reflect same state interests…
And therefore must be the acting in concert or being simultaneously used by the same powers. To do this you have to ignore that the US is not in the EU, not all countries in one is in the other, etc. But, whatever. Believing Europe is in US’s pocket is far down M’s list of sins)