The paper was published by Corisk, a Norwegian risk-management firm.

There is much that needs to be said on this topic, because the sanctions were only partially in retaliation for the Russian Federation’s invasion of their neighboring country, and were also intended to be a deterrence from further escalating the war.

The economic red button

In a Bloomberg featured story published a year after Russia launched its so-called special military operation, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is described as a denim-wearing, sleep-deprived mess, waiting, as if during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for his boss Joe Biden to give the call which would see him launch an “economic nuclear weapon”.

The weapon so-called was the freezing of $300 billion worth of Russian bank assets held around the world; an act of “shock-and-awe” that was kept a carefully-guarded secret from potential discovery by Russian intelligence.

What was intended to be an H-bomb over the ruble was more like a firecracker, as the ruble varied in value during the post-invasion period from a brief tanking, to stronger than before the sanctions were implemented. Russia’s oil was quickly devoured by energy-hungry countries like India, while natural gas was too valuable for Europe to abandon and continued to be sold in large amounts.

By the time it became clear their nuclear weapon didn’t even have the capacity to hurt the Russian war effort, much less cause Putin to negotiate his way out of the conflict, Sullivan’s plan of attack just turned the economic war, like so many other conventional wars before it, into one of “attrition” as one analyst told Bloomberg.

However, to continue with the nuclear analogy, it wasn’t supposed to be general nuclear war—it wasn’t intended to crater the Russian economy as a whole for risk of cratering all of Europe with it. Instead, it was limited to an act of deterrence that would weaken the Russian economy just enough to convince Putin it wasn’t worth it to continue on the warpath.

In the last 6-largest sanctions campaigns, in Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and North Korea, the desired result was never attained. The sanctioned regime never changed its behavior, and the US’ economic war always went from one that was supposed to be decisive to one that was attritional.

Why this wasn’t considered by Sullivan and his stressed-out coffee-swilling staffers deserves questioning, but then again, it’s reminiscent of how the war began—a supposedly calculated response to deter Russia that didn’t work, and created bigger problems for Biden’s foreign policy team.

“Carefully calibrated”

In a pre-war article filled with some of the most telling admissions of the US’ true aims in this conflict, Helene Cooper of the New York Times quoted Biden admin. officials who said that $2.5 billion in military aid from the US has been “calibrated” not to provoke Mr. Putin into invading.

At the time, Biden officials, who had just finished losing the 20-year war in Afghanistan, were enthusiastic about backing a Ukrainian insurgency under the perceived conditions of a total Russian takeover of the nation.

“If Putin invades Ukraine with a major military force, U.S. and NATO military assistance—intelligence, cyber, anti-armor and anti-air weapons, offensive naval missiles—would ratchet up significantly,” James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was the supreme allied commander at NATO, told The Times.

“And if it turned into a Ukrainian insurgency, Putin should realize that after fighting insurgencies ourselves for two decades, we know how to arm, train and energize them”.

As it turns out, this not only failed to deter Putin, but was one of the largest motivations for his attack.

During a January 2022 meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Russia’s ambassador to that meeting said:

“If we don’t hear constructive response to our proposals within a reasonable timeframe and aggressive behavior towards [Russia] continues, we’ll have to take necessary measures to ensure strategic balance and eliminate unacceptable threats to our national security,” Lukashevich said to reporters.

Spoken in perfect diplomatic language, it clashed terribly with NATO members’ rhetoric about “drums of war” and “marshaling an international coalition of the willing” to fight Russia.

All this is to say that the West, particularly the US, is obviously terrible at “calibrating” deterrents of any kind, and neither the economic war, nor the conventional, non-declared one against Russia, has added any post-hoc recalculations of Putin’s war aims.

This is all the more consequential now because of two reasons. The first is that President Putin can and will use nuclear weapons against Ukraine to ensure the stability of the Russian regime, unlike Cuba or Syria who have no means to effectively resist sanctions campaigns against their economies.

The second is that the economic nuclear weapon launched by Sullivan and his oh-so-exhausted staffers on February 26th, 2022, was rejected by the world. For their own varied reasons, Asia, South America, Africa, and Oceania want to trade with Russia, and according to Corisk, the private sectors of Europe want to as well.

None of these economies or individual actors see this conflict like those at the OSCE meeting did, namely a clash between ideologies that threatened to shake the foundations of the post-Cold War Era forever—they saw it as a border dispute between NATO and Russia, and they would like to get on with their lives. WaL