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Opinion
April 27, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 24
Finally, sanctions can primarily be envisaged
as tools of domestic policy. One of the primary rationales behind enacting measures to push Russian kleptocrats and their dirty money out of the UK, for example, is simply as part of a wider cleansing of one of the world’s great money laun- dries, the City of London.
While it is certainly true that these broad roles can overlap, the point is that there needs to be
a clear sense of a plausible end-state towards which the sanctions are meant to be driving. Just as importantly, that needs to be communicated. Most sanctions are in essence forms of signalling in international relations, but without indicating what their purpose may be, it is hard to maintain a multi-national coalition, and harder yet mean- ingfully to affect Russian policy.
Building a sanctions regime that works
Put simply, the Western sanctions regime needs to be coherent, purposeful, and creative.
They cannot simply be driven by what individual countries can do — even ones as powerful as the US — and less yet by internal struggles over policy within a government. They must flow from a consensus of sorts, at least amongst key part- ners, lest they become resented and resisted as “US imperialism,” already a theme in Russian propaganda that does find some attentive audi- ences.
More importantly, they have to have clear, spe- cific and credible aims, and with them a roadmap for how they can be lifted. Simply punishing Pu- tin’s Russia for being what it is, while appealing
to some in the West, is unlikely to lead to real change. Putin has too much invested in his geo- political crusade to “make Russia great again,” and the rich Russians in the immediate firing line lack the capacity to challenge or coerce him. The days when oligarchs could dictate policy have long passed. Today they are best considered the state's stewards of the economy, rich and free so long
as the state — and more powerful peers — allow them to be.
Besides, sanctions are also prone to unintended consequences. Driving rich Russians and their questionable money out of London and the other financial capitals of choice perversely may actually benefit Putin, at least in the short term. He has been pushing “de-offshorisation,” the repatriation of those funds which fled Russia’s capricious courts and rule of lawlessness. How thoughtful of the West to help. Likewise, oligarchs driven home by sanctions and hobbled by their restrictions become all the more dependent on government tolerance and largesse.
Of course, if the aim is truly to break the system, then this may have its virtues. The more the state has to bail out the very people who embezzled and exploited it, the less money there is left over. And if some are protected and others not, then this generates inevitable tensions and divisions. The oligarchs may not run the Kremlin, but the Krem- lin needs at least a reasonable contingent of them to manage its economy.
If recent years have taught the West anything, though, it is that regime change is easier to trigger than manage. As things currently stand, the likelihood is that Putin’s departure from the Kremlin will usher in a time of greater pragma- tism. However, more overt efforts to hasten that process or attack his system not only empower his paranoiac and defensive legitimating myth that Russia is under siege, they make it more likely he either will not feel he can step down or will seek an even more hawkish successor. How does President Patrushev sound?
None of this means sanctions are not crucial instruments of the current Russia-West geopo- litical struggle. However, they must be applied collectively and with a clear sense of their intent. They should also be creative: the aim ought not simply be to do what is easy, but what is effec- tive; what, in other words, is most likely to affect Putin’s calculi. Expelling oligarchs, for example, could be combined with measures to undercut the state’s “beleaguered fortress” narrative by