.sheelahk reports on the U.S. Treasury Department bureaucrats at the front of a sophisticated sanctions campaign designed to hurt Putin’s economy and weaken his war machine.
After the First World War, as the League of Nations considered the use of economic measures as a way to deter countries from invading one another, Woodrow Wilson spoke of sanctions as a tactic “more tremendous” than physical conflict. One nation had only to impose on another this “economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force,” he said. “It is a terrible remedy.
By 2004, a new unit of the department, the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, had been granted almost imperial powers. It could cut off financial support not just to suspected terrorists or money launderers but to anyone doing anything that threatened national security or undermined the integrity of the international financial system. The unit’s analysts played offense and defense, as Glaser put it.
Paradoxically, such harsh and prolonged sanctions have sometimes consolidated the power of the regime that the Americans were trying to undermine. Even in Tehran, fundamentalist leaders gained political legitimacy from the external embattlement. So did Fidel Castro during a decades-long embargo of Cuba.
Russia, the eleventh-largest economy in the world, could mitigate the effects of sanctions by turning to China or other countries outside of the Western sphere of political influence. Jack Lew, the Treasury Secretary at the time, brought together the department’s sanctions experts and its economists to identify aspects of the Russian economy that were solely dependent on the West. One area of vulnerability was Russia’s access to stock and bond markets in London and New York.
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