Russia sanctions 101: five questions you were too embarrassed to ask

President Obama has announced several rounds of economic sanctions on Moscow, acting with European allies. Here are answers to some simple questions about sanction specifics.

4. Do 'smart sanctions' work?

That depends on what you mean by “work.” US officials usually point to Libya as one place where individual sanctions had a major effect. When Libyans rose against strongman Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, the US moved rapidly to freeze foreign assets held by Mr. Qaddafi, his tottering government, and his relatives and cronies. They had unwisely left lots of wealth exposed: One foreign bank alone held $29 billion in Qaddafi-linked cash.

The sanctions appeared to push top Libyans to defect, contributing to Qaddafi’s eventual overthrow. “Freezing Libyan assets had a far greater impact than first expected,” said Jose Fernandez, then assistant secretary of State, Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, in a 2012 speech.

Then there is North Korea. The US and its allies first slapped sanctions on luxury goods favored by the state’s leadership, such as Rolex watches, in 2005. So far, there’s no evidence this has moderated Pyongyang’s behavior.

When it comes to economic sanctions, it matters what you’re trying to do. Targeted approaches have targeted effects.

“If the goal of sanctions is containment, then a smart sanctions approach might make sense. If the goal is to compel a change in the target’s behavior, then in the long run comprehensive sanctions might be the more humanitarian approach,” wrote Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, in a 2003 academic paper on the subject.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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