How far would the United States go to back Ukraine? - Anthony Faiola (WP)

 

By Anthony Faiola  with Sammy Westfall  Email The Washington Post, January 20, 2022

How far would the United States go to back Ukraine?

Ukrainian soldiers launch a U.S.-supplied Javelin missile during military exercises in Ukraine's Donetsk region on Dec. 23, 2021. (AP)

The risk of war in Europe is rising. A blitz of diplomacy has failed to defuse fears of a Russian invasion in Ukraine, whose pro-Western government is sounding the alarm that Moscow has “almost completed” a menacing troop buildup on the country’s eastern frontier. A strike would force Washington and European allies to move from deterrence to action.

But how far is the West willing to go to defend Ukraine?

U.S. officials have warned of a possible Russian invasion for weeks. Espousing a vision of Russia and Ukraine as “one nation,” Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding a promise that its neighbor will never join NATO. Defending the right to self-determination, the Biden administration has refused such a pledge. Russia continues to deny a pending assault. But on Wednesday, President Biden predicted Putin would “move in” on Ukraine because, after all of his saber-rattling, “he has to do something.”

Biden on Wednesday suggested the Western response would depend on the level of Russian intervention, before clarifying Thursday that the United States would not accept even a “minor incursion.” What a “war” could look like runs the gambit: Cyberattacks on Kyiv (which have already begun, though by actors as yet undetermined). Missile strikes. A limited occupation of the Donbas region — a part of Ukraine in the grips of Russian-backed separatists for years. The worst case scenario: A full-on march on Kyiv.

Biden has ruled out American troops going head to head with the Russians, a response that risks escalation between nuclear powers. Threats of reprisals have instead centered on sanctions. Yet, with Europe dependent on Russian gas, doubts linger about how far key partners, particularly Germany, would be willing to go. And even if Moscow were slapped with biting sanctions, they tend to inflict sustainable wounds. Just ask Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, whose regime has withstood some of the harshest possible U.S. sanctions and came out stronger by tapping a rogues gallery of alternative financial partners in Moscow, Tehran, Ankara and Beijing.

But talk is growing of a combined response in the event of an invasion that could mix economic pain with a higher cost for Putin on the battlefield in the form of a U.S.-backed, pro-Western Ukrainian insurgency. The roughly $2.5 billion in U.S. aid committed to Ukraine since 2014 has focused on defensive weaponry, including Javelin antitank missiles, retired Coast Guard cutters, armored Humvees, radios and communications equipment. The United States has also helped to train Ukrainian special forces.

But Washington is signaling that an invasion could be a game changer, potentially bringing a host of new assistance, resources and weaponry for guerilla-style warfare in parts of Ukraine the Russians seize, and turning Putin’s incursion there into an Afghanistan-like quagmire.

The Post’s David Ignatius wrote last month that the Biden administration was weighing “ways to provide weapons and other support to the Ukrainian military to resist invading Russian forces — and similar logistical support to insurgent groups if Russia topples the Ukrainian government and a guerrilla war begins.”

Last week, Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that help could involve training in NATO eastern flank countries including Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Beyond logistical support and weapons, Cooper wrote, the United States and NATO allies could also supply medical equipment, services and even sanctuary during Russian offensives.

“In discussions with allies, senior Biden officials have also made clear that the CIA (covertly) and the Pentagon (overtly) would both seek to help any Ukrainian insurgency,” Cooper wrote.

As the specter of war grows, military aid to Ukraine is already ramping up. The Biden administration on Wednesday announced an additional $200 million in defensive military aid. That came after Britain this week said it had begun shipping antitank weapons to Ukraine to help it boost defenses. “They are not strategic weapons and pose no threat to Russia,” British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told Parliament. “They are to use in self-defense.”

But a Russian invasion appears set to compel the West to send more, and broader, firepower: “I think that we’re talking about trying to take the edge or deter a Russian mostly conventional ground offensive,” Peter Zwack, former U.S. Army brigadier general and former defense attache to the Russian Federation, told NPR this week. “And for that, the Ukrainians would need more Javelin antitank missiles.”

They would need surface-to-air missiles such as Stingers, he said: “They need to be able to knock down, threaten Russian air support.”

Going further requires a certain calculus.

Several European countries are unlikely to back an insurgency, stoking divisions among allies.

Moscow has also signaled an aggressive response, threatening military deployments to Cuba and Venezuela. U.S.-backed insurgencies also have no great track record — think Nicaragua, Syria and many more.

Yet the goal might not be victory but, rather, punishment: To ratchet up the cost to Putin of a Ukrainian adventure. Seth Jones, director of International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that punishment could be a prolonged insurgency that grinds away at the Russian military. To make that happen, he calls for a “Twenty-First Century Lend-Lease Act” led by the United States to provide Ukraine with war materiel at no cost. Priority items, he writes, would be the needs of a military involved in sustained combat, including air defense, antitank, and anti-ship systems; electronic warfare and cyber defense systems; small arms and artillery ammunition; spare vehicle parts; petroleum; rations and medical support.

James Nixey, director of the Russia-Eurasia program at London-based Chatham House, told me that the Ukrainians — better trained and equipped than when Russia’s “little green men” moved into Donbas nearly a decade ago — are likely to put up far more of a fight than the Russians encountered during their crushing blow to Georgia in 2008.

Western assistance in a guerilla-style war could amp up the pressure. Ukrainians would pay the highest price.

But Putin “will also not be able to hide all of those body bags,” Nixey said.

The United States of Sanctions - Daniel W. Drezner (Foreign Affairs)

The United States of Sanctions

The Use and Abuse of Economic Coercion

Daniel W. Drezner

Foreign Affairs, Nova York – 16/09/2021

 

In theory, superpowers should possess a range of foreign policy tools: military might, cultural cachet, diplomatic persuasion, technological prowess, economic aid, and so on. But to anyone paying attention to U.S. foreign policy for the past decade, it has become obvious that the United States relies on one tool above all: economic sanctions.

Sanctions—measures taken by one country to disrupt economic exchange with another—have become the go-to solution for nearly every foreign policy problem. During President Barack Obama’s first term, the United States designated an average of 500 entities for sanctions per year for reasons ranging from human rights abuses to nuclear proliferation to violations of territorial sovereignty. That figure nearly doubled over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency. President Joe Biden, in his first few months in office, imposed new sanctions against Myanmar (for its coup), Nicaragua (for its crackdown), and Russia (for its hacking). He has not fundamentally altered any of the Trump administration’s sanctions programs beyond lifting those against the International Criminal Court. To punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi, the Biden administration sanctioned certain Saudi officials, and yet human rights activists wanted more.Activists have also clamored for sanctions on China for its persecution of the Uyghurs, on Hungary for its democratic backsliding, and on Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. 

This reliance on economic sanctions would be natural if they were especially effective at getting other countries to do what Washington wants, but they’re not. The most generous academic estimate of sanctions’ efficacy—a 2014 study relying on a data set maintained by the University of North Carolina—found that, at best, sanctions lead to concessions between one-third and one-half of the time. A 2019 Government Accountability Office study concluded that not even the federal government was necessarily aware when sanctions were working. Officials at the Treasury, State, and Commerce Departments, the report noted, “stated they do not conduct agency assessments of the effectiveness of sanctions in achieving broader U.S. policy goals.” 

The truth is that Washington’s fixation with sanctions has little to do with their efficacy and everything to do with something else: American decline. No longer an unchallenged superpower, the United States can’t throw its weight around the way it used to. In relative terms, its military power and diplomatic influence have declined. Two decades of war, recession, polarization, and now a pandemic have dented American power. Frustrated U.S. presidents are left with fewer arrows in their quiver, and they are quick to reach for the easy, available tool of sanctions.

The problem, however, is that sanctions are hardly cost free. They strain relations with allies, antagonize adversaries, and impose economic hardship on innocent civilians.Thus, sanctions not only reveal American decline but accelerate it, too. To make matters worse, the tool is growing duller by the year. Future sanctions are likely to be even less effective as China and Russia happily swoop in to rescue targeted actors and as U.S. allies and partners tire of the repeated application of economic pressure. Together, these developments will render the U.S. dollar less central to global finance, reducing the effect of sanctions that rely on that dominance. 

Washington should use sanctions surgically and sparingly. Under a more disciplined approach to economic statecraft, officials would clarify the goal of a particular measure and the criteria for repealing it. But most important, they would remember that there are other tools at their disposal. Sanctions are a specialized instrument best deployed in controlled circumstances, not an all-purpose tool for everyday use. Policymakers should treat them like a scalpel, not a Swiss Army knife. 

 

A HISTORY OF ECONOMIC VIOLENCE

 

Economic statecraft has been a vital component of U.S. diplomacy since the early days of the republic. As president, Thomas Jefferson urged passage of the Embargo Act of 1807 to punish the United Kingdom and Napoleonic France for harassing U.S. ships. That effort at sanctions was a disaster. Back in the day, the United States needed European markets far more than the United Kingdom and France needed a fledgling country in the New World; the Embargo Act cost the United States far more than it did the European great powers. Even so, the United States continued to use trade as its main foreign policy tool, focusing on prying open foreign markets for export and promoting foreign investment at home. This was only natural given the paltry size of the U.S. military for most of the nineteenth century. The preeminence of the British pound in global finance also meant that the U.S. dollar was not an important currency. Trade was the primary way the United States conducted diplomacy. 

At the end of World War I, the United States renewed its enthusiasm for trade sanctions as a means of regulating world politics. President Woodrow Wilson urged Americans to support the League of Nations by arguing that its power to sanction would act as a substitute for war. “A nation boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender,” he said in 1919. “Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy.” Americans were unconvinced, and the United States never joined the League of Nations. In the end, sanctions imposed by the league failed to deter Italy from invading Ethiopia in 1935 or stop any other act of belligerence that led to World War II. To the contrary, the U.S. embargo on fuel and other war materials going to Japan helped precipitate the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Policymakers should treat sanctions like a scalpel, not a Swiss Army knife. 

The advent of the Cold War expanded the array of tools of economic statecraft available to the United States. For the first time, the country supplied a significant amount of multilateral and bilateral foreign aid; stopping that aid was an easy way of applying economic pressure. The United States’ most successful use of economic sanctions in this period came during the 1956 Suez crisis. Outraged by the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, Washington prevented the United Kingdom from drawing down its International Monetary Fund reserves to defend its currency. The subsequent run on the pound forced London to withdraw its troops.

Most of the time, however, U.S. sanctions failed. In the early years of the Cold War, the United States embargoed Soviet allies to deny them access to vital resources and technologies. That embargo succeeded as an act of containment. But sanctions designed to compel changes in behavior had little bite, since the Soviet Union simply stepped in to offer economic support to the targeted economies. In the early 1960s, for example, as the United States tightened its embargo on exports to Cuba, the Soviets threw Fidel Castro’s regime an economic lifeline by channeling massive amounts of aid to Havana. Later in the Cold War, the United States used economic sanctions to pressure allies and adversaries alike to improve their human rights records. Beyond the rare success of sanctioning a close ally, economic pressure worked only when it came from a broad multilateral coalition, such as the UN sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa.

The end of the Cold War brought an initial burst of hope about sanctions. With the Soviets no longer automatically vetoing UN Security Council resolutions, it seemed possible that multilateral trade sanctions could replace war, just as Wilson had dreamed. Reality quickly proved otherwise. In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Security Council imposed a comprehensive trade embargo on Iraq. These crushing sanctions cut the country’s GDP in half. They were nonetheless unable to compel Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait; it took the Gulf War to accomplish that. Sanctions against Iraq continued after the war, but the humanitarian costs were staggering: infant mortality rates were widely viewed to have skyrocketed, and per capita income remained stagnant for 15 years. Iraq manipulated figures to exaggerate the humanitarian costs of the sanctions, but the deception worked. Policymakers came to believe that trade sanctions were a blunt instrument that harmed ordinary civilians rather than the elites whose behavior they were intended to alter. So they searched for smarter sanctions that could hit a regime’s ruling coalition.

The centrality of the U.S. dollar seemed to offer a way of doing just that. Beginning in the late 1990s and accelerating after 9/11, the United States made it harder for any financial institution to engage in dollar transactions with sanctioned governments, companies, or people. U.S. and foreign banks need access to U.S. dollars in order to function; even the implicit threat of being denied such access has made most banks in the world reluctant to work with sanctioned entities, effectively expelling them from the global financial system.

These sanctions have proved more potent. Whereas restrictions on trade incentivize private-sector actors to resort to black-market operations, the opposite dynamic is at play with measures concerning dollar transactions. Because financial institutions care about their global reputation and wish to stay in the good graces of U.S. regulators, they tend to comply eagerly with sanctions and even preemptively dump clients seen as too risky. In 2005, when the United States designated the Macao-based bank Banco Delta Asia as a money-laundering concern working on behalf of North Korea, even Chinese banks responded with alacrity to limit their exposure. 

As U.S. sanctions grew more powerful, they scored some notable wins. The George W. Bush administration cracked down on terrorist financing and money laundering, as governments bent over backward to retain their access to the U.S. financial system. The Obama administration amped up sanctions against Iran, which drove the country to negotiate a deal restricting its nuclear program in return for the lifting of some sanctions. The Trump administration threatened to raise tariffs and shut down the U.S.-Mexican border to compel Mexico to interdict Central American migrants; in response, the Mexican government deployed its new National Guard to restrict the flow.

 

(……………………………………………………………………………)

 

Yet for every success, there were more failures. The United States has imposed decades-long sanctions on Belarus, Cuba, Russia, Syria, and Zimbabwe with little to show in the way of tangible results. The Trump administration ratcheted up U.S. economic pressure against Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela as part of its “maximum pressure” campaigns to block even minor evasions of economic restrictions. The efforts also relied on what are known as “secondary sanctions,” whereby third-party countries and companies are threatened with economic coercion if they do not agree to participate in sanctioning the initial target. In every case, the target suffered severe economic costs yet made no concessions. Not even Venezuela, a bankrupt socialist state experiencing hyperinflation in the United States’ backyard, acquiesced.

Sanctions cannot and will not go away anytime soon. Other great powers, such as China and Russia, are becoming increasingly active sanctioners. China has used an array of informal measures to punish Japan, Norway, South Korea, and even the National Basketball Association over the past decade; Russia sanctioned former Soviet republics to deter them from joining an EU initiative in eastern Europe. Aspiring great powers, such as Saudi Arabia, have also tried their hand at economic coercion. There will be more sanctions in the future, not fewer. 

But that doesn’t mean the United States has to be part of the problem. Even the countries now discovering sanctions still rely on them for only a fraction of their foreign policy goals; they also sign trade deals, engage in cultural diplomacy, and dole out foreign aid to win friends and influence countries. So did the United States once. Washington needs to exercise the policy muscles it has let atrophy, lest a statecraft gap emerge between it and other governments. U.S. policymakers have become so sanctions-happy that they have blinded themselves to the long-term costs of this tool. To compete with the other great powers, the United States needs to remind the world that it is more than a one-trick pony.

 

DANIEL W. DREZNER is Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

 

Para acessar a íntegra: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-08-24/united-states-sanctions

 

Most recent book by Thomas Sowell: Charter Schools and Their Enemies - Jason L. Riley (WSJ)

Thomas Sowell Has Been Right From the Start

By Jason L. Riley

The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2020

His latest book on charter schools continues his research on minority success in education.

The economist Thomas Sowell’s new book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies, was published last month on his 90th birthday. I hope he’s not done yet, but you could hardly find a more suitable swan song for a publishing career that has now spanned six decades.

Mr. Sowell’s earliest tomes—an economics textbook for college undergraduates and a book on economic history—were directed at students of the dismal science. But his third book, the semi autobiographical “Black Education: Myths and Tragedies,” was published in 1972 and written for the general public. It grew out of a long article on college admissions standards for black students that he wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1970 after leaving his teaching post at Cornell. And it begins with a recounting of his own education— first at segregated schools in North Carolina, where he was born, and later at integrated schools in New York City, where he was raised.

The topic of education is one that he’s returned to repeatedly in his writings over the decades, in books like “Education: Assumptions Versus History” (1986), “Choosing a College” (1989) and “Inside American Education” (1993). In addition, he’s done pioneering research on the history of black education in the U.S. The preface to his latest work describes a conversation he had in the early 1970s with Irving Kristol, the late editor of the Public Interest. When Kristol asked what could be done to create high-quality schools for blacks, Mr. Sowell replied that such schools already existed and had for generations.

Kristol asked Mr. Sowell to write about these schools for the magazine, and a 1974 issue of Public Interest featured a lengthy essay by Mr. Sowell on the history of all-black Dunbar High School in Washington, which had outperformed its local white counterparts and repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests throughout the first half of the 20th century. Over an 85-year span, from 1870 to 1955, the article noted, “most of Dunbar’s graduates went on to college, even though most Americans—white or black—did not.” Two years later, in the same publication, he wrote a second article, on successful black elementary and high schools located throughout the country. Mr. Sowell later told a friend that his work on black education had been “the most emotionally satisfying research I have ever done.”

In a sense today’s public charter schools, which often have predominantly low-income black and Hispanic student bodies, are successors to the high-achieving black schools that Mr. Sowell researched 40 years ago. The first part of “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” describes—in damning detail and with the empirical rigor we’ve come to expect from the author—how successful certain charter schools have been in educating poor minorities. To make sure he’s comparing apples to apples, his sample is limited to charter schools that are located in the same building with a traditional public school serving the same community.

And what’s irrefutably clear is that these charters schools are not simply doing a better job than their traditional counterparts with the same demographic groups. In many cases, inner-city charter-school students are outperforming their peers in the wealthiest and whitest suburban school districts in the country. In New York City, for example, the Success Academy charter schools have effectively closed the academic achievement gap between black and white students.

“The educational success of these charter schools undermines theories of genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in the tests, assertions that racial ‘integration’ is necessary for blacks to reach educational parity and presumptions that income differences are among the ‘root causes’ of educational differences,” Mr. Sowell writes. “This last claim has been used for decades to absolve traditional public schools of any responsibility for educational failures in low-income minority communities.”

The point isn’t that there are no subpar charter schools—there are— but it’s clear to the author that any honest assessment of the data shows that school choice is a boon for groups that have long been poorly served by the system. It’s also clear that successful charter schools are a threat to the current power balance that allows the vested interests of adults who run public education to trump what’s best for students. As Mr. Sowell reminds us, “schools exist for the education of children. Schools do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for teachers college degrees or a captive audience for indoctrinators.”

In recent years, charter-school skeptics have made headway. Limits have been placed on how many can open and where they can be located. And Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, is being pressured by progressives to limit charter growth if elected. All of which makes Mr. Sowell’s new book, in addition to its many other attributes, quite timely.

Amazon presentation: 

About the Author

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of dozens of books and the recipient of various awards, including the National Humanities Medal, presented by the President of the United States in 2003.

A leading conservative intellectual defends charter schools against the teachers' unions, politicians, and liberal educators who threaten to dismantle their success.

The black-white educational achievement gap -- so much discussed for so many years -- has already been closed by black students attending New York City's charter schools. This might be expected to be welcome news. But it has been very unwelcome news in traditional public schools whose students are transferring to charter schools. A backlash against charter schools has been led by teachers unions, politicians and others -- not only in New York but across the country. If those attacks succeed, the biggest losers will be minority youngsters for whom a quality education is their biggest chance for a better life.

• Hardcover: 288 páginas
• Editora: Basic Books (30 de junho de 2020)
• Idioma: English
• ISBN-10: 1541675134
• ISBN-13: 978-1541675131
• Dimensões do produto: 16,2 x 2,5 x 24,1 cm

Randy A. Cook

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book that will make your blood boil!

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2020

Verified Purchase

First off, you need to get past chapter 2, which may seem tough after seeing the statistics seemingly repeated for several different Charter School networks, but don't get discouraged! There is light at the end of the Chapter 2 tunnel! The level of downright immoral and uncaring behavior of people who seemingly always claim to be so caring about everyone is apalling, and frankly shocking. I can only hope this book reaches many parents who need better schools for their children. If we're lucky it will speak to someone in society whomis truly looking for a way to help kids in failing schools and who has the means to start a Charter School, and has the stomach for it...

It will be interesting to see the negative reviews and refutations of this book over the coming weeks and months which hopefully bring this topic to the national stage.

The author has taken the time and effort to overcome seemingly every objection (valid and frivolous) to charter schools by providing the data to support his assertions, primarily from New York state. He is honest where charter schools aren't the best, but the overwhelming supply of emperical data suggests that Charter Schools are much needed and in greater numbers in most big cities.

His disdain for the Mayor of New York is not lost on the reader, and rightfully so after reading the actions taken by the Mayor to sacrifice the education of New York's youngsters for what seems to be his own ego and that of his "supporters". I just can't understand it myself, but like I said, maybe we'll see some rebuttals, and hopefully they have facts to back them up.