To Punish Putin, Economic Sanctions Are Unlikely to Do the Trick<br />Kim Jong-un was still in college in 2006 when the United Nations Security Council, in a resolution drafted by the United<br />States, imposed economic sanctions on his father’s regime to stop North Korea from becoming a nuclear power.<br />If there are members of Congress who believe that the package will change Mr. Putin’s behavior — convince him of the merits of returning Crimea to Ukraine, perhaps, or<br />persuade him to stop his hacker friends from tinkering with foreign elections — they might be interested in a decommissioned North Korean reactor I have for sale.<br />And yet one could argue that Mr. Putin hasn’t moved on the Baltics because they are not as critical to Russia as Ukraine, a country through which it pumps 80 percent of the natural gas it sells to Western Europe; which was home to its Black Sea fleet before the move on Crimea;<br />and which was flirting with moving out of the Russian orbit into the hostile arms of NATO.<br />But when the goal is ambitious, the economic ties not overwhelming, the target country powerful,<br />and the target government autocratic — think Russia, Ukraine, hacking — their track record is not particularly good.<br />When sanctions “have modest objectives and are aimed at countries<br />that are not terribly powerful but have tasted a little flavor of democracy and have close economic connections to the sanctioning coalition,” Mr. Hufbauer told me, they succeed in changing countries’ behavior about half the time.<br />Even if sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama in 2014 did not compel Russia to leave Crimea, they add,<br />without them Mr. Putin might have felt emboldened to send Russian forces across the Baltic republics.
