But of course this veil can be pierced when it suits the administration, but not when it'd positively benefit the life of american citizens.

Let's be realistic here. There are no executives or board members who faced charges for prohibited transactions with Iran or NK. It's not like we don't have a steady stream of companies reporting that they inadvertently hired NK citizens remotely.

There are blanket sanction waivers (General License) by OFAC to allow certain things. There's also the possibility to get an OFAC license (as GitHub did.)

The real issue is there is little to no advantage (realistically no money to be gained from Iran) or even awareness (sometimes the cloud infrastructure bans Iran by default and you don't have enough users to even know that's the case to care.) The legal counsels would generally be conservative and advise against it; there needs to be someone from the business side, e.g. a product manager that cares enough to try to push back on the legal. There often is not or it is hard to justify the tiniest risk, hence you block.

I've seen this sentiment so many times from westerners. You all say this, and yet at the same time you levy economic sanctions on countries like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, with the justification that by making their citizens lives horrific, you encourage them to rise against their government.

Their authoritarian militaristic government that doesn't care for human rights.

If you apply the same standard to the North Korean citizens, that they should not be expected to "take that risk", they your country's sanctions are pure collective punishment with no strategic value. You just tortured people for fun.

So should we (people outside US) sanction these companies, so that they put the same pressure on US government to stop forcing them from applying sanctions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_agains...

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the United States Treasury Department. It administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions in support of U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.

We simply love to inflict pain and suffering. This is why we circumcise, why we ear crop, tail dock, create animals, put people in solitary, etc.

That's a total non-sequitor.

GP stated that he will personally face prison time for going against the laws of his country.

Why would anyone risk jail time for you? For your countrymen? Why don't you risk jail time for some other country?

I think the argument is that you deprive belligerent companies from the resources they need to attack and harm others. The suffering their citizens endure is unfortunate, but why should Americans take the blame when Kim Jong Un is so obviously culpable?

Sadly, in our world where everyone has a voice, you're going to get a lot of this. There's no avoiding the stupids.

"American IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Israel so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians."

There are valid ways to punish a country for aggressive or oppressive actions - like sanctions - and there are non-valid ways - inherently blaming and then ostracizing every member of the country, for example. And when you take the position that, "If you don't agree with my actions, you're also part of the problem" you are not doing anything but causing people to get annoyed with you and your position, and reducing credibility for the groups you're trying to advocate for. In other words, you're doing more harm than good.

As a service owner currently looking at adding widescale blocks based on location... it's not a global business, so the downside of blocking an entire country is functionally zero and the upside of easily removing a tonne of compromised machines from the 'can try to DDoS us' pool is noticeable.

The intent was never to change your political stance. It's just plain old hate. Armchair political activists are always looking for "morally correct" excuses to be racist and xenophobic, and "your government did a mean thing so you as a citizen are responsible" is one of their favorites.

And by "hold power internally" I don't mean population uprising, I mean to keep the factions within the government (especially the military) united under the leadership by buying them out.

I believe increased population unhappiness is more of a side-effect that can be both beneficial (if it incites anti-government sentiment) or detrimental (if it incites nationalism) to the country imposing sanctions.

Like we did in Afghanistan? Because we lost Afghanistan in the same time we took the country, about two weeks.

Various tools hosted on Github can be considered dual-use (i.e. AES/TLS libraries). Furthermore, Microsoft was made to apply sanctions against Karim Khan of the ICC for his involvement in investigating the genocide of Palestinians; I doubt Microsoft would be granted an exception so they can serve Hamas' greatest supporter after that.

I don't know if Microsoft has applied for any exceptions, but even if they did, I doubt they'd be able to get them. That's on top of the probability of bad publicity ("Microsoft wants to cut deal with Iran") and the lack of incentive you mentioned.

https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

"You all" is a weird way of putting it. I don't support my government levying sanctions on these countries, but I have zero power to change it.

It's funny, as the gist author points out that he doesn't support the actions of the Islamic Republic, and has no power to change it because it's minority rule by a theocratic dictatorship.

But even in the US, no one I've ever had the option to vote for (and who had even a remote chance of winning) would ever consider lifting these sanctions. So I am similarly powerless to change this situation.

I think sanctions are largely pointless if their stated goal is to get citizens to rise up and change their governments. Asking people to risk their lives (when you're not risking anything at all) is an awful thing to do, and this sort of thing isn't likely to work.

But it's probably not really that; the idea is to choke the economies of these countries so they can't do whatever Bad Thing the sanction-leviers are worried about (like developing nuclear weapons). How effective sanctions are at achieving that goal is an exercise left to the reader. And even if they are effective, there's a lot of collateral damage that hurts people who have no say in the matter.

That's the PR justification. The real one is "to hurt the countries and make them do as we say" and "because we can".

The justification is reduced financial capacity for war and similar atrocities.

In everyday speech, people don’t carefully separate “the people” from “the state.” A French person talking about the U.S. usually says les Américains. A German talking about the French will just say die Franzosen — or, if they’re in the mood to tease, die Froschfresser. It’s only in news or diplomatic language that you see “the American government,” “the French government,” or “London” when referring to Britain.

The phrase “this administration” is mostly used domestically, by citizens talking about their own rulers. In Portugal you’d hear "este governo é uma merda", and in Spain the exact same sentiment — give or take a letter or two.

And “Nazi Germany” is only used when distinguishing regimes — Weimar vs. Federal Republic, Estado Novo vs. the Portuguese Republics, the French Fourth vs. the Fifth Republic, and so on.

I can guarantee that your views would change very quickly if bombs started falling closer to where you sit and killing your friends and people you know.

The problem is not with "bad" countries.

The problem is when a large amount of abusive traffic comes from a handful of countries, it's technically easier to block entire IP ranges and ASNs, than to filter and allow the small amount of well-behaved clients while blocking the rest. This is especially the case when the company has no commercial presence in these countries.

To be fair, the scenario you describe where countries are blocked purely out of political or personal reasons does exist, and I agree that it's morally wrong, even if it's the prerogative of any individual or company who they want to provide service to. But in my experience the blocking is usually motivated by abuse.

If you want a democratic Iran, both the current government of Iran and its most powerful enemies will do everything they can to stop you.

The actual intent of sanctions is to cause economic damage. In that respect this is an account of the sanctions working exactly as intended: they are making it harder for OP to work as a software developer, which makes it harder for the Iranian regime to benefit (directly or indirectly) from the efforts of software developers in Iran.

They have the power to choose who rules them if they want to. Nobody else does. Iranians are responsible for Iran's actions just like Russians are responsible for Russia's actions and Americans are responsible for America's actions.

Where did you get that data from and what do you mean by "hate" in quantifiable terms? (just being "unhappy" with outcomes of certain policies does not mean they would necessarily want to uproot everything for the better)

At the same time, sanctions also work in other ways: they punish governments that break international norms, they send a signal to the world about what’s considered unacceptable, and they reaffirm shared values. That’s why they’re still used despite the harsh effects on ordinary people. They aren’t a perfect solution, but in Western thinking their role is to combine pressure, deterrence and symbolism, rather than just collective punishment for its own sake.

This works about a third of the time [1].

What does is incentivising domestic policy changes. We saw that with the nuclear deal. But then Trump blew it up because Obama did it.

(On another level, sanctions degrade capability. If there is no room for peace, at least you can limit your adversary’s economy and thus martial production. If regime change randomly happens, you can use lifting sanctions to blow oxygen on the new government’s flame [2].)

[1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1, page 159

[2] https://the307.substack.com/p/how-sanctions-function-as-a-to...

Very easy to say. Quite hard to pull off. People in authoritarian countries have very little leverage and would like just to live fullfilling lives.

I’m not saying ”don’t do sanctions” but this mechanistic outcome is highly improbable.

”perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.”

Um - the most polite way of stating this is that this view of how political systems work is highly delusional at best.

Ruling party depends on _elite_ _compliance_.

That might make sense if the email stopped at "Iranian IPs", but it continued with "... due to your decision ..." (emphasis mine). That makes it sound like the author is personally responsible.

Abuse is becoming a much bigger problem lately, to the point that even large western providers are getting the same treatment nowadays. More and more I see people talking about banning Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, and at any given time I can see several of their IP addresses in abuse reporting websites (spamhaus, abuseipdb).

What is the future here? I see no reason for those providers to tighten on abusers, given how long they’ve already ignored it. Pretty sure at some point you’ll have to have your own ASN and IP ranges to be able to do anything on the internet.

In my experience the reason is one of the following:

1. Following the local jurisdiction. By far the most common one, and one I have least questions for. At least not to the companies who implement this policy - someone over here already posted the consequences of not complying. Big companies often care to say "nothing personal, buddy, strictly business", but nothing more as in the OP's case with Microsoft.

2. Avoiding the attacks, as you said. I definitely agree they exist. And I can imagine every Cloudflare block page I've seen is because of that, but in my experience it's maybe 5-10% of all blockings I experienced.

3. Political activism. What my comment was about. It's always either individuals or small companies. It's always outrageously dumb and pathetic (obviously, except when it comes from an actual victim) and just does the job opposite to the proclaimed intention.

It's probably some kind of coping mechanism for not knowing anything about the people they're talking about, or they want to keep their world view nice and clean: we, the good guys, VS them, the uncivilized bad guys. It's as accurate as saying "all Americans are pro Maga white Christians because obviously if they weren't their government would be different"

A shower thought:

Wouldn't it make more sense if country A that considers sanctions against country B provided very "cushy" immigration laws for highly educated people from country B so that country A profits from these people's efforts while country B will suffer from a brain drain?

2 prevalent groups of which are retired and people who moved there to make their ends meet, which will be complete around the retirement age.

> Yes, it is hard to change anything in a dictatorship. I know that from personal experience.

How many changes you did under dictators with actual armies, spy networks, chemical and nuclear weapons?

I would say it is a bit more realpolitik than that. An "Evil" leader doesn't care about the common good, but all leaders need subordinates to carry out their orders, security forces to carry out their rules, etc. Sanctions are meant to put pressure on all those people. So either A; the leader changes their actions so as not to risk losing the people that turn their will into action, or B; those subordinates put someone else in charge that will play ball.

This is the symbolic value of sanctions. It’s a part of coalition building and domestic messaging. (Though if you constantly do it this becomes less effective.)

It’s a classic team-building strategy: costly signalling [1]. You see it in mafias, but like, also when a softball team buys matching jerseys.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_e...

>That's the theory, but has it ever worked?

The point is not to (directly) instigate regime change, but to influence the actions of the existing regime, as well as other state actors not under sanctions, by demonstrating to them how bad it can get. Make an example and so on.

The suffering of the civilians is not the goal of sanctions but a consequence of the choices their - legitimate or not - leaders make, and which ultimately impacts their ability to engage in foreign trade. No country has an obligation to trade with any other, so if civilians suffer after foreign trade is limited, the agency and moral responsibility is with the regime that failed to secure friendly trade relations. Often, humanitarian exceptions are carved out to limit this.

It definitely "works", in the sense that it's often the only tool available, along with positive reinforcements such as aid and support and the threat of stopping them, which is just another flavor of the same. It's hard to have a benchmark for something that "works" better, since countries are sovereign and by definition have disputes and don't blindly follow any established rules or rulers.

It kinda worked in Syria. The combination of sanctions, plus squatting on sovereign Syrian territory and preventing the government from generating income eventually left Assad's military so hollowed out that that the Turkish-backed rebel faction led by former Al Qaeda members was able to essentially drive to Damascus with minimal resistance.

"Your country is sanctioned because your government is being a global ass, wink-wink"

Implying that a change in government will lift the sanctions.

Effective air defense against military superpower (and they were effectively fighting against American technology) is something very hard to build, with or without sanctions. Ukraine is a good proof: Russia was denied air superiority using manned aircrafts but they still manage to inflict significant damage with missiles and drones.

> I don't think the USSR is still around, and it largely collapsed due to economic pressure

It wasn’t external pressure at all. Soviet Union had everything to be self-sustainable (e.g. Russia and Ukraine have proven later that in agriculture it’s absolutely possible). They failed to execute transition to regulated market economy the way China did. Gorbachev thought democracy goes first (the entire Warsaw bloc collapsed thanks to “blue jeans” - KGB and Stasi feared Western culture the most, and the West was ready to send more of it).

Depriving Iranians of legal access to Western tools opens the market to locals. I suspect that the market is big enough to build a business.

It'difficult to assess gdp impact in this particular area. It's not really dependent on blockable imports.

The US also did not create political Islam, which predates the US by over 1000 years. Blaming the US for the problems of this region which has always had these problems is counter-factual. The problems of this part of the world - poverty, violence, religious oppression and dictatorships - predate western civilization as a whole, and in fact the oppressive empires from the Middle East / North Africa spread earlier and wider than western empires.

Also, collective punishment is literally as old as written history. I’m not sure if there are writings that provide a coherent moral theory of why it’s acceptable that you could call “collective responsibility” from those times, but it was the norm for thousands of years of warfare.

Now I agree that the policies of the United States may not always be in the interest of the people from that part of the world, but a "mild" dictator like the one that the Saudi Arabia has or the one that Turkey has right now, these are better models sometimes. The SA of 50 years ago had no notion of human rights and severely under developed and could in no way support a democracy. Of course a dictatorship is not ideal, and the people of SA will have to pay a terrible price for it some day, but for now a dictatorship that "bows" to the west is not the worst thing either.

It's easy to call for action from your comfortable life.

No, the populace does not bear the same responsibility for the country's actions in all countries. Swiss with direct democracy bear much higher responsibility than systematically oppressed populace in other countries.

Some even line up to vote for sham Presidential elections of the Mullah regime, whose turnout legitimizes the regime, while inside the United States! Being Stanford educated does not prevent this seemingly cognitive dissonance or perhaps deception; it actually makes that more likely.

Analyze who have perpetrated most invasions ("military operations" if you like euphemisms) in the last 40 years and you'll be surprised who you'd need to "block" given your logic.

Of course, you won't block yourself because it's convenient to be a jingoist when it doesn't affect you.

However, sanctions do have a symbolic value. And I also can't think of anything else short of military action to express displeasure.

Now we have a pacified populace that allows corruption to run freely and keeps repeating "violence is never the answer" while forgetting meaningful change almost always requires it.

Never forget we wouldn't even have weekends if people hadn't died for it.

I wish we never needed violence but it seems to be wishful thinking rather than reality. Will people oppose the next Hitler by ranting on Twitter and peaceful protests? Something tells me that won't work.

Yes. About a third of the time [1].

[1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1 page 159

Like, during WW2 the UK was being bombed and ration books and supply shortages were the order of the day. They look back on their endurance of the conditions inflicted upon them as a source of national pride, have to imagine that is the case for many in the sanctioned countries too.

Sanctions punish ordinary people, many of whom are already suffering under the regime. So they end up opposing both an internal and an external enemy. In the long run, sanctions probably destroy and cost far more lives than wars. It's a sadistic way to try to crush an enemy.

There are sanctions targeting governments specifically, but usually government sanctions also target civilians. You can't exactly expect a sanctioned government to be transparent, it'll hide its government business under company names if you let it.

That's what the US has been doing since forever, even actively participating in the war crimes. If you think any of the stated reasons for the sanctions are real, I have a bridge to sell you.

Your second argument - that this is acceptable collateral damage - makes more sense, but it requires demonstrating that there is some connection between the specific measures and "making it harder".

So, you either take personal responsibility for enforcing sanctions yourself, or you admit that sanctions are a form of collective punishment for no reason. You can't have it both ways.

Russian military industrial output has significantly increased and more importantly they demonstrated the ability to scale it up very quickly. The economy has grown during the war - the effects of the sanctions may become painful in the long term only if they will stay for decades, which is unlikely.

Either of these three markets can set rules on what device manufacturers have to do in order to be allowed to access the market, and they all use that power - China is particularly infamous (with Apple having had to set up a dedicated iCloud instance to which the Chinese government may or may not have a backdoor), India more focuses on the share of production that happens in China, and the EU is seriously tightening the screws on American companies when it comes to arbitrarily denying store access.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-nie...

In your linked article Microsoft say they didn’t block “the ICC”, but also mention the “disconnection of an official”.

They were accused of blocking a single individual (the chief prosecutor), and the response is basically “we didnt block the whole organisation”?

Sanctions are designed to prevent an enemy government from profiting from our western economy. Sanctions are designed to bring hostile entities to the negotiation table. Sanctions curtail the worst behaviors of enemy nations because the sanctions deny those enemies money. Money is power. Little money = little power.

I was under the assumption that in Western democracies, citizens have a say their government and its enacted laws.

We can't unfortunately assert the same for people of Iran since they don't live in a democracy.

Iran is a theocratic autocracy. Only the autocrat and his supporters bear any significant responsibility for the actions of the government there.

Mostly the military, from what I hear. The rest of the economy is in shambles [1].

No matter what: once the war in Ukraine is over by whatever solution, it's going to get nasty. Either Putin (or, more likely, his successor - the dude is old and it's by far not sure if he will be able to stay in power should the war end up bad for Russia) manages to turn around the economy once again from producing tanks and other instruments of war to a regular economy, or they'll keep it that way... and attack another country with all that firepower.

[1] https://kyivindependent.com/amid-dwindling-economy-number-of...

1. Hamas, an Iranian proxy, attacked Israel on October 7th 2023. Until that time, the death toll in the 100 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about 10k Israels to 40k Palestinians. It since became 12k Israelis to 110k Palestinians. I don't think that proxy fulfilled its intention.

2. Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy, attacked Israel on October 8th in support of Hamas. The ensuing war killed about 4k Lebanese. That proxy, too, seems to have failed in its mission to reduce the death tol..

3. The Houthis, yet another Iranian proxy, attacked Israel in support of Gaza. Since then, Israeli counter attacks killed several hundreds in Yemen. Not good.

Now these proxies are heavily damaged, deprived of most strategic capabilities and the death toll in the ensuing battles dwarfed all of the past deaths in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

In basically every case a bad government is preferable to the destruction, chaos and death a civil war brings. "Just overthrow your government" is ridiculous plea.

"greatest"? Hardly. A charge was brought before the ICC from South Africa which required the ICC to investigate.

There are much bigger supporters of Hamas, the sanctions against employees of the ICC is just the current US government flexing its retribution muscles.

Obviously untrue. Iran has 90 million citizens, and multitudes of that number do care out of principle. I am not trying to change your mind, but hope you would be more precise in your language next time to describe why you don’t care.

Not saying Obama’s foreign policy was perfect, but he did do the Iran nuclear deal which lifted some sanctions, and started the process of normalizing relations with Cuba. Like so many other things, these were immediately undone by his successor…

If the sanctions were effective Russia wouldn't be offering entirely one-sided deals that it knows nobody is going to accept, because it would be desperate enough to get those sanctions lifted that it would actually have to concede something in a deal.

You are mixing up ICC and ICJ. South Africa brought a case to the ICJ. This is the country equivalent of suing another country so its not really forcing ICJ to investigate so much as south africa is presenting a case which icj will decide on (eventually anyways, icj is famous for being slow).

The ICC on the other hand makes its own decisions on who to investigate/charge. Countries can file referrals to it, but the ICC prosecutor has discretion on what they want to investigate and pursue.

[Anyone who thinks the ICC likes hamas should remember that the icc also filed charges against a hamas leader too. Its difficult for them to investigate hamas because they are only allowed to charge people who are currently alive]

They are somewhat similar at the moment in some very unfortunate ways.

Who would give an honest answer here?

Tales from an insider don't help very much, because people will only report about their own bubble, the city/province/town they live in, their family and friends of similar interest and social status, their workplace, etc. Also, there can be a severe selection bias, people wanting to talk to outsiders on the internet or even leave a country are probably more often critical of a regime and its decisions.

So from the outside, the only sensible thing we can do is see the country as a whole, lump in the government with the people. Because we cannot really know if people think differently and who they are. We cannot isolate or punish "just the government". And if there were a majority against the current government, there would be a revolution at some point. If there isn't one, opposition against the regime just isn't strong enough.

That is because they wouldn't be having a family in Germany since they would be dead

Well they did intervene during the 1952 revolution. The secular democratic government wasn't very convenient so they basically undid the revolution and reinstalled the Shah in power. Then the second time the Shah was overthrown, it was done by Islamists, not by the secular elected parliament.

So what is interesting is that this person is fully able to assign blame to individual Iranians for their government's actions but, one would imagine, is able to separate themselves from the actions of the US government.

I wrote "one would imagine" because there was no reply so we cannot say for sure. But my experience with Americans who do this "all Iranians/North Koreans/Syrians/Iraqis etc are bad!" thing is that they carve out little exceptions for themselves and the USA so that their reasons to hate others never seem to apply to themselves.

Mostly because the USSR was the new enemy and Germany had to be an ally after WW2.

While the war was still ongoing there was carpet-bombing of German civilians, and some of the plans for after the war originally included complete destruction of industrial capacities, forced displacement of the population of formerly industrialized areas and forced labour for the whole population (google Morgenthau plans).

Notice how I didn't say "collective punishment" yet you put those words into my mouth and argue with that. Collective responsibility was was most definitely enforced on German* culture where it still echoes throughout the norms of education and political systems.

* West German really, as the East remained unreformed: which you can clearly see in the voting patterns today.

Failing that, I don't know. I guess they'll have to figure it out as they go. All I'm saying is it's their country, their responsibility. And for example in the case of Russia there's clearly widespread support for Putin and his war so I'm not really expecting nor calling for them to do anything about it. I'm just saying I hold them responsible and I think the rest of the world should too. A leader is nothing without followers.

Then I recommend some history books. Family ties can be strong and the persecution of the jews was not always as violent and open as it was during the war. It was more systematic discrimination in the beginning, so of course people still travelled back and forth. Uprooting a whole family is not a simple thing.

"Some even line up to vote for sham Presidential elections of the Mullah regime"

What else they are supposed to do?

That is a small option of influence and they use it. You think the Mullahs would loose their power if people just would not vote for them? If that would be true, they would be a democracy.

I have. It was Russia. They are indeed blocked and I am not surprised.

> Of course, you won't block yourself because it's convenient to be a jingoist when it doesn't affect you.

No, I won't block myself because my little country has not invaded anyone. If you are assuming I am an American, I am not.

Counterpoint: South Africa.

> If the West is expecting any revolution due to sanctions, I have not seen it.

You have now.

What percentage of Russia's foreign transactions went through those banks?

Certainly, normal people can't normally transfer money to/from Russia. The same for almost all companies.

Overall, we found sanctions to be at least partially successful in 34 percent of the cases that we documented.

By our standards, successful cases are those with an overall success score of 9 or higher. We emphasize that a score of 9 does not mean that economic sanctions achieved a foreign policy triumph. It means only that sanctions made a modest contribution to a goal that was partly realized, often at some political cost to the sender country.

Yet in many cases, it is fair to say that sanctions were a necessary component of the overall campaign that focused primarily on the projection of military force.

Second, we classify some sanctions as failing to produce a real change in the target’s behavior when their primary if unstated purpose—namely, demonstrating resolve at home, signaling disapproval abroad, or simple punishment—may have been fully realized.

That's the thing in a crony dictatorship: these people might not hold public office in name, but in practice they act under direct license, authority and orders of the dictator. We're already seeing this in Hungary, where close friends of the local de-facto-dictator Viktor Orban control almost all media and absolutely use that ownership to further entrench Orban's rule - it's hard to achieve political change when the media simply doesn't care about you.

And now, we're seeing the beginnings in the US, just from another angle - public kowtowing and open extortion, such as with Jimmy Kimmel who got cancelled after a threat to block a corporate merger, and it's not the first time either. And no, the fact that Disney walked back after their stock price took a decent dip doesn't mean that this is the last time such an event will take place.

Yes ideally we’d live in a world where this bullshit doesn’t happen. But it does happen, so our choices are to respond with the tools we have NOW or not respond at all.

By that definition Putin is a civilian.

More broadly: plenty of sanctions explicitly target military-only kit. Those are not “designed to hurt civilians,” though I guess a civilian working in a munitions factory might lose their job.

And you think this is a good thing? Like we should be consistent and support all war crimes instead of just some of them?

Just because we do bad things, doesn’t make it right to do more bad things.

And for some it worked out pretty badly. Hungarians rebeled against communism, but that rebellion was put down brutally.

You are correct that towards the end of the Soviet Union many of the client states and Russia itself had popular uprisings which succeeded, but that that point the Communist Government was already failing.

My point is not that no popular uprising has ever worked or that outside pressure can not force the end of some regime, but that telling people that they need to take up arms against their government is an insane proposition.

And yet we allow israel to develop nuclear weapons and fund terrorist groups. At least in iran's defense, they aren't engaging in genocide like israel is.

> For the life of me I can't understand why it was undone.

Zionist domination of america. We're always told china this or russia that, but we don't waste trillions of dollars fighting for china or russia.

I think I need to clarify what I mean by "responsibility". Many people confuse "you are responsible" with "you did this" or "it is your fault", but this is not exactly true. Let's say I am an alcoholic. I believe alcoholism is an affliction (some people might not agree with that, but that's another discussion - let's ignore that for now and assume it is an affliction). Therefore, I believe it is not my fault that I am an alcoholic - It was just bad luck that I was born that way. Yet, it is my responsibility to control my alcoholism. If I hurt someone while under the influence, I have to bear the consequences. Some might argue it is not entirely fair, and I would agree. But in my view, it is the closest we can get to fair. I have a better chance of controlling my alcoholism than some random person whose kids I might have killed while driving under the influence.

Alcoholism is an extreme example, but if you think about it for a while, being responsible for something that is not your fault is common. I see Russians responsible in the same way. Citizens of a state share collective responsibility for what their state is doing. And the fact that an individual might not be able to do anything about it does not change that.

> Your second argument - that this is acceptable collateral damage - makes more sense, but it requires demonstrating that there is some connection between the specific measures and "making it harder".

Why? This is not a court of law, where you have to prove guilt to inflict punishment. Sanctions are not a punishment (which is also why I do not like arguments about collective punishment used in this discussion and elsewhere). They are an attempt to pressure a state to stop causing harm. And if that attempt is based on somewhat reasonable assumptions (which, in the case of Russia and Iran, I think it is), I am fine with it.

And let's not forget it is a relatively peaceful attempt. Nazi Germany was "persuaded" by literally destroying them to the point of unconditional capitulation. And many people who had nothing to do with Hitler died. In an ideal world, they would not have, because it was not their fault and they could not do anything, but the problem is that we only have very crude ways of dissuading states from causing harm.

> Syria didn't collapse because of sanctions

Nobody said it did.

> don't think there has ever been a case where a country, or its people, changed the regime because of sanctions. Never

Literally a source with a page number, and, in a neighbouring comment, a table with the specifics.

Like, if you had a button that could convert the world’s hot wars into mutual embargoes, would you not push it? Up the stakes: mutual embargo plus embargoed by their leading trade partner.

Maybe the government will do this because the sanctions hurt their people enough to the point where things are too unstable for their liking. Maybe their economy becomes so trashed that the quality of the leaders' lives is impacted too much. Etc.

I don't think anyone in the West genuinely believes that sanctions will lead to citizen uprisings and overthrown governments. At least not after decades where no such successful uprisings have taken place in long-sanctioned countries like Iran.

But it should also be pretty clear that sanctions on countries like Iran aren't causing their governments to choose to change their behavior either. But I think arguably sanctions on Russia since they invaded Ukraine have had a useful effect. While the war hasn't stopped, it's possible that sanctions have slowed down Russia's progress quite a bit.

Not sure what the alternative is, though, aside from just giving up, lifting sanctions, and letting things develop where they may.

Yes indeed, I agree.

Although: long term foreign relationships certainly can be un-built on top of four year presidential terms. See: current US president and rest-of-the-world.

Netanyahu has been saying Iran in minutes away from building nuclear weapons since early 2010s.

Never mind those facts. Let's say they are building weapons. What gives the US the right to build enough nuclear weapons that they could destroy the world multiple times over, but Iran cannot? Why is the US funding terrorist groups, but Iran cannot? Just cos they're the big bad boogeyman? Don't you think it'd be better to normalise relationship with them so that they become friendly? So that even if they are building weapons, they wouldn't use it against us because they're allies?

They did slow down all kinds of progress in Russia except the progress towards the full blown fascism and the progress of the military complex at the expence of its citizens

Even the Asian parts of the USSR mostly had peaceful transitions into independence (and often into the hands of new semi-dictators, but that's beside the point).

Already having nuclear weapons, being a superpower and the center of the post-WW2 and post-Cold-War world, being able to fight 2 ground wars simultaneously, etc.

The relationships between countries is governed by nothing other than might makes right, and any seemingly altruistic cooperation between the hegemon and its lessers only occurs because the hegemon benefits more.

Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?

> Don't you think it'd be better to normalise relationship with them so that they become friendly?

There's no normalising of relations with a country who's constitution enshrines that '[Iran's military is] not only for guarding the country but for "fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God's path"' [2] and that hopes that "this century will witness the establishment of a universal holy government and the downfall of all others" [2] (hint: that's us).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Iran#Sharia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Iran#Preamble

The US can rebuild most of what they destroyed. It's gone now, and some of it they were already on the process of losing and can't get back. But no country is beyond reconstruction.

…we just had a hot war with Iran. It probably cost us less than our sanctions.

I’ll say this: you’re consistent in your position and I respect that. I just don’t think many people share the view that people getting physically torn apart by munitions is better than have a less-comfortable, possibly borderline, life.

The US has been directly or indirectly involved in all conflict in the middle east in the past few decades, and the instability in the region is due to the US's failed foreign policy.

Maybe the US should stop pretending they know what they're doing. The US can't keep domestic terrorism at bay, why are they trying in a foreign setting?

Ironically, this statement could apply to Pakistan, which has had nuclear weapons since 1998 and yet has never used them. How strange! According to Western leadership, all Muslims are supposed to be barbarian religious fanatics who want a worldwide nuclear holocaust!

Iran having a nuclear weapon would make the Middle East and the world a much safer place - if Ukraine had not disposed of their nuclear weapons in the 1990s, there would be no war happening right now! Possession of nuclear weapons is the only way for a country to guarantee its own sovereignty, which is something America and its coalition do not want for Iran - they want a weak puppet like the Shah who will let Exxonmobil come in and take all their oil revenue for themselves.

And yeah, the US should get out of the Middle East - we need to stop pretending is that sharia-law is compatible with western liberal democracies*.

* This IMO is the socio-cultural reason for the Middle East's instability following the US’s interventions - and why similar interventions had more success elsewhere.

> According to Western leadership, all Muslims are supposed to be barbarian religious fanatics who want a worldwide nuclear holocaust!

Thanks for telling me what I and every other westerner thinks!

As you have clearly stated, we can therefore easily conclude that all muslim countries (and by extension their people) are equivalent and all must therefore share the explicit ideological goal (enshrined in their constitution) to "fulfil the ideological mission of jihad" and hopes for "the downfall of all other [non-islamic] governments". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Iran#Preamble

Just to be clear: all muslim countries (and people) are equivalent = obvious sarcasm. To believe that I'd have to be about as braindead as someone who believes that all citizens of western countries share the same values, goals, and ideologies as each other (and their governments).

Russian industry is operating at only 81% capacity, largely due to labor shortages, which make sense considering that about 1% of its labor force join the military every other month. Russia is losing tank barrels, artillery barrels, and infantry fighting vehicles more than 10 times faster than it can manufacture new ones. It will likely never be able to obtain a third rotary forge, required for barrel manufacture, to expand its capacity. It has almost entirely cannibalized its old, defunct Soviet era stock. They are being kept afloat by China, NK, and Iran, but with a much-reduced capacity, and often much lower quality. For example, Russia relies on China for 70-80% of its microchips, but China is dumping defective microchips on them with a 40% failure rate.

Sanctions have absolutely had significant, direct, measurable impacts on Russia’s ability to wage war and sustain war.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/11/21/half-of-russias-ai... https://jamestown.org/program/russia-exhausts-soviet-era-arm... https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-where-are-russias-... https://archive.ph/c17pk https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/is-202... https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-sanctions-have-reshaped-ru... https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme... https://osintforukraine.com/publications/microchips https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/russia_china_semicond...

Idk, how much?

To be clear: Pakistan is a military dictatorship with Sharia Law and Sharia courts in effect for decades, and Islam as their state religion (something that isn't even true of Iran, a country of great religious diversity that's not reflected in Western propaganda). They are as much a theocracy as Saudi Arabia, yet their nuclear weapons aren't an issue because they play patty-cake with Western interests and have no oil reserves for Exxonmobil to salivate over.

Are you suggesting the West should have put these harsh sanctions before the war? My recollection of Dec 2021 and Jan/Feb 2022 were that the West was trying to avoid inciting the crazy Russian dictator: Biden had two tele conferences with Putin in December, there were three meetings in Jan (OSCE - Russia, NATO - Russia, Lavrov - Blinken)

And I do not think the situation is unwinnable for the West (it is probably unwinnable for Ukraine as it will not be able to get its territory back). Russia is getting weaker with every man it loses, every tank is destroyed, every young man/woman who decides to leave. I would be surprised if Western Europe will want to do business with Russia for a generation - which basically makes Russia China's vassal for the same period of time.

Russia will be in bad shape for decades. The West will be just fine.

> Is there something uniquely dangerous about Muslims in possession of nuclear weapons that you'd like to tell the class?

Nope, just that religious fanatics (of all flavours) who believe they have the moral duty to kill, conquer, and subserve - and who proudly state their goals - have caused a disproportionate amount of unnecessary suffering throughout history.

> something that isn't even true of Iran

Do I really need to give you their constitution again?

> great religious diversity

Diversity doesn't mean the ruling class aren't islamic fundamentalists. The suffering of these diverse peoples under Khamenei's rule should be enough to show you how much water your statement holds. It also demonstrates the exact willingness to persecute others which makes me think twice about supporting their nuclear armament.

https://iranhumanrights.org/2025/04/imprisonment-of-christia...

> They are as much a theocracy as Saudi Arabia

The country who's flag is the Shahada? Ok.

> Saudi Arabia, yet their nuclear weapons aren't an issue

The Saudis don't (officially) have nukes. Do you know something I don't?