Military action is appearing more preferable to that.
For example:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxk454kxz8o
> In the wake of the February 2022 invasion, Ukraine's allies imposed sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. The US and UK banned Russian oil and gas, while the EU banned Russian seaborne crude imports, but not gas.
> Despite this, by 29 May, Russia had made more than €883bn ($973bn; £740bn) in revenue from fossil fuel exports since the start of the full-scale invasion, including €228bn from the sanctioning countries, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
> The lion's share of that amount, €209bn, came from EU member states.
Meaning 3 years into the war Europe is still sending more $$ to Russia for gas than they send Ukraine in aid
He recently revisited that in FP magazine (https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi...) arguing for keeping sanctions on Russia even though they clearly aren't going to coerce Russia into abandoning their war in Ukraine. The first reason is to re-enforce the global norm against territorial expansion. We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce. And the other reason is to weaken their economy for the grinding war of attrition that is currently happening, and not make territorial expansion easy for them.
Sanctions are a negative-rate compounding system. Sarah Paine from the US Naval War College:
> People look at sanctions and go, “Oh, they don't work because you don't make whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing.” What they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's annoying you over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea. It's powerful over several generations.
I'm not really optimistic about western Europe's willingness to absorb damage in it economy in order to damage Russia. France's government expenditures are 55% of GDP, much of it financed by borrowing. That's the level maintained by major powers in the world wars. Can the French state demand more from a private sector that's funding the equivalent of a total war?
Worse yet, western European politics gives you the strong impression all these expenditures are necessary to prevent the election of a pro-Russian government or a bloody revolution.
Hence why sanctions seem to be something of a joke.
The “global community” you’re referring to consists of America and its client states—only around 1/8th of the world’s population.
What are the current borders of Yugoslavia?
Did anybody in the west argue that redrawing the borders of Yugoslavia was against global norms?
Did you?
The previous Russian imperial project, the Soviet Union, ended 35 years ago, not 80. It's easy to overlook that they forcibly redrew borders and kept them redrawn for decades (and still to this day do keep some territories they conquered in imperialist wars when they were still allied with Nazi Germany).
It's not like ww2 where you have increasingly fewer people who were old enough to consciously experience it. It's very likely that most people on this forum were around for the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian imperialism.
Eastern Europe looks a heck of a lot different, as did British India.
In all fairness, 80 years ago, the world was on the cusp of a massive border redraw, but the Phillipine Islands were still a US territory.
Cool story bro. Almost like Kosovo never happened.
The reduction of purchase of gas from Russia did significantly impacted energy prices across EU to the point of populist far-right pro-russia governments rising in popularity (even though that is not the only reason).
So Russia and China has a long term strategy of subverting the west and we are just reacting when there are no good options available.
But, sanctions do work. The problem is that the economic power of the west is comparable these days to "global north".
Europe wasn't forced. Europe chose and chose freely. Europe chose poorly.
Great call. Feel free to head to the front lines and put your life on the line. Or should only other people do that?
(I know 'tariff' has become a dirty word these days to due the obvious abuse, but I swear I'm making this comment in good faith)
There's an artificially oversized haystack the needles are hiding in.
We need to follow the process. And the process should be extensive. This is a problem of not enough process. Ideally, we could have more.
Does Norway even have juries? At least in Sweden we don't have any juries in court (and the two countries tend to be more similar than not), so while the overall comment sounds fitting (and I agree), some details seem to miss the detail of what country this is about :)
There are so many cases in which criminals just open a ton of new companies, to overload the authorities. Until the authorities shut something down, they moved on three times already.
With all the broadband communications and high definition video and audio, it should have been trivial to prove the fraud and disincentivize committing it by sufficiently punishing it.
The state fell short on that because everyone hates violence so there isn't the political will to deploy it at the drop of a hat multiplied by everyone's pet issues.
The state "technically could" do a lot of stuff but it doesn't because doing even a small subset of those things more than it does would destabilize it.
Getting ports around the world to check back with the originating agency on every document they look at... would be a lot of extra work.
Almost invariably if I read a story in the morning - the title will be different after noon.
First, when I buy mandatory car insurance, police can check its validity in seconds. I'd expect international shipping to be at least at that level of strictness.
Second, how insurance can help avoid sanctions? The enforcement should look at the goods source and destination, not on who insured them, right?
Might as well do whatever is most effective, which is likely to be harsh sanctions followed by military action to fully enforce them.
No one is saying that states will never collapse, will never split up, will never secede. But the fact that no existing state tried to take advantage of the confusion in the USSR and gain revenge for an ancient wrong? That was the result of this global norm, which held up even as the USSR (and Yugoslavia) fell apart. And that is a very good thing.
A lot of people were calling this strategy stupid, but that was the consensus for multiple decades.
You can also tell that the strategy with China failed in exactly the same way.
So I think the world will be a very different place in the next millennia.
Europe did choose poorly, but it's not like the U.S. is an amicable partner. They want to sell their gas at their preferred prices as well.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
North Korean citizens have now normalized to poverty and destitution after generations of sanctions. There are quite a few of them working alongside the South Asian labour force in the Middle East, engaged in slavish labour that the Gulf nations are often criticized for.
How's that working out? Apparently someone miscalculated.
Edit: it has been pointed out to me that lay judges have even more powers such as interpretation of law than juries, which seems dangerous.
[1]: https://east-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Belarus-E...
They did do sanctions, so I don't know what you're trying to argue.
> Tariffs would have only made energy even more expensive than it already was.
Not as expensive as outright sanctions, of course.
As I said - sanctions are discrete (yes or no), whereas tariffs are a continuous knob.
The increases in energy prices mostly came from voluntary attempts to find alternatives to Russian energy and from Russia constraining the supply.
There are still some qualitative differences: With sanctions, you'll know something dodgy has occurred when you find a pallet of My Little Putin dolls traveling through the port, you don't need to call up a bunch of lawyers and accountants.
That said, I readily admit that oil is a lot more disguise-able and fungible.
The real question is what if there were none - Russia would have more money and thus have done a lot more damage to Ukraine - but there is no way to measure damage they could have done.
The words you apparently missed from what GP wrote are: "slightly reduce" and "some leverage". Nobody said that sanctions end wars or bring about peace negotiations on their own.
Would it be nice if sanctions were equivalent to invasion and does that matter to the argument that they are better to implement than do nothing?
But what they've done is worsen the lot for the layman North Korean.
North Korea was already a nuclear threat decades ago. Where they were lagging behind was in ICBMs that could reach the continental United States.
I still have no idea what you think is an alternative that would have made a North Korea with South Korea's economy a great thing for arms control.
Keeping North Korea poor has all been waste of time unless our goal was to have 75 years of "wasted time" before a potentially uncontrollable escalation with China.