So far, economic sanctions on Russia have done nothing to halt Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. The ruble is still strong. Oil prices are high. Before Ukraine’s latest advances on the battlefield, polls showed that 75% of Russians still supported the war (in public at any rate).
So why continue with sanctions? Economic boycotts, of course, are one way for democratic governments to demonstrate their opposition to tyranny and military aggression without actually having to go to war.
They also represent an effort to turn people against their autocratic leaders. Some European politicians have claimed that stopping Russians from travelling to Europe will encourage them to demand an end to the war. Punishing oligarchs by seizing their yachts and freezing their foreign bank accounts is intended in part to encourage an elite backlash against Putin.
In fact, economic punishment almost never has the desired effect of bringing down a tyranny or stopping violent aggression. The Iranian theocracy, widely disliked by much of the country’s urban population, has not relaxed its grip despite years of economic isolation. Similarly, there is no sign that Vladimir Putin’s autocratic power is waning.
Anyone in need of further proof should look to the military precedent for this kind of thinking — the “strategic bombing” of whole towns and cities pioneered during World War Two.
Bombing civilians, rather like imposing sanctions, was also conceived as a way to avoid sending armies into bloody and attritional combat. The idea at first was that terrorizing people would force them into submission. The British used the method in the 1920s to put down a revolt of Iraqi tribesmen. The Japanese opted for a similar strategy in China in the 1930s. The Germans followed up in Warsaw and Rotterdam at the beginning of World War II, then continued their bombing campaign in London and other cities.
It wasn’t until 1942 that governments started looking at intentionally punishing people in the hope that they would bring down their leaders. The charge was led by two of the same men who were involved in bombing Iraqis in the 1920s: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, then head of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command.
Too many British aircrews were being lost in precision bombing of military targets and Churchill decided that it would be smarter to try and shatter the morale of the German population with indiscriminate bombing. Surely, once Hamburg, Berlin and other cities went up in flames, Germans would no longer support Hitler and his gang.
Almost every Japanese city was destroyed by the Americans in 1944 and 1945 with the same object in mind. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the last and most devastating example of strategic bombing in the war.
Yet neither the Germans nor the Japanese ever turned against their regimes. They knew that criticizing their leaders in public could mean death. People instead tried to survive as best they could.
If anything, shared hardship tends to rally people around a common enemy and strengthen support for their leaders. The US learned this lesson yet again in North Vietnam in the early 1970s, when the Pentagon tried to bomb that country into submission.
Perhaps things would have been different if the Germans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, or indeed the Iranians and the Russians today, had been free to oppose their leaders. The one case where economic punishment has met with success is in South Africa. Economic and sporting boycotts that humiliated and isolated the country helped to bring down the apartheid regime. That was only possible because white South Africans, as opposed to blacks, were living in a democracy, where votes and public opinion mattered.
Putin is clearly counting on this distinction, hoping that cutting off energy supplies to Europe this winter will prompt citizens there to rethink support for Ukraine. He and his followers believe that people in the liberal West are decadent and soft. Russians, in Putin’s view, can take the pain. Europeans can’t.
This prejudice has been shared by many autocrats in the past. Wars in Europe and Asia were started on the assumption that free citizens lacked the stomach for a fight. And indeed, democracies may be vulnerable to pressures that don’t have the same impact in authoritarian countries. Wars are hard to sustain in democracies once the public refuses to endorse them.
At the same time, Ukrainians are certainly showing that they are prepared to fight for their freedom, just as the British did in World War Two. It is now up to other democracies to bear the consequences of helping Ukraine defend itself. If Russians can resist economic pressure in a misbegotten cause, they should do no less in a virtuous one.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Ian Buruma is professor of human rights at Bard College. His latest book is "The Churchill Complex."
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
