[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Let's talk about these economic sanctions being placed on Russia right now. Who do they hurt, and can they pressure Putin into giving up his murderous attack on Ukraine? There are effects we can quantify already, the Russian ruble has dropped about 30% to record lows, and Russia's stock market has been closed for a week. Imagine the losses if it opens again soon.

It's not just governments who are doing the sanctioning, this is a big deal. The private sector has piled on with what effectively amounts to sanctions of their own. Maybe you've heard some of these things. Energy giants like ExxonMobil and BP have pulled out of Russia. Of course, Russia has an oil and gas economy primarily. Automakers like GM and Volvo have stopped exports to Russia.

Retailers like Apple, Nike, and Adidas all say they pause sales in Russia, as have semiconductor giants, Intel and AMD. May be hard for Russians to even get the shipment of goods as Maersk and other shipping companies have suspended delivery, except for food, medical, and humanitarian deliveries and the list goes on.

There's still no sign of Russia capitulating. Do sanctions actually work, and who do they actually hurt? The answer is they work sometimes. Back when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, The Washington Post had an article called 13 times that sanctions worked. We'll go over some of those, but can they work in this instance, and how long would that take?

Joining us now is Heather Hurlburt, who is director of the New Models for Policy Change Program at the New America Foundation, a think tank which works at the intersection of politics and international affairs. Heather also worked in the Clinton administration for the State Department, and as a special assistant to President Clinton. She's also been a contributor to New York Magazine, as well as a frequent guest on this show. Heather, it's always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Heather Hurlburt: Brian, it's great to be back. I just wish it wasn't such terrible circumstances.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. I feel like, over my whole life, we've had sanctions against countries that the US considers bad guys, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Iraq, before we invaded it. The bad guys remain in power, at least in the big countries, but sometimes sanctions work. Is there a rule of thumb as to when sanctions work?

Heather Hurlburt: There's sort of three conditions that I would put down that we know from the data about when sanctions are most effective. Sanctions are most effective when they're multilateral, when you have a bunch of countries or, as you said, countries, and also the private sector working together so that it's harder for a country to get around them.

They work best when they're targeted. That is when you're trying to get a country to change a very specific thing like Libya, get rid of your nuclear weapons, Iran, sign a deal with the United States to control your nuclear program. They also work best when there's a very specific way that the entities being sanctioned can get out from under them.

If you think about it, the same way it works in your own life. If you know what you have to do to get someone to stop punishing you, you're much more likely to do it than if you think, as has become the case with some US sanctions that, as you say-- basically, as you were reading my bio, I thought I could think of some sanctions that have been in place throughout that whole bio. If you think nothing you can do will get the US to change the policy, then there's no reason for you to stop doing it.

Brian Lehrer: Are the sanctions then different from ones you've seen in the past in kind or in scope?

Heather Hurlburt: The amazing thing about these sanctions is how broad and deep they are, and how broadly supported around the world they are. We've really never seen anything like this. There's never been an attempt to go after a central bank of a major country in quite this way. We've never seen, in the decades of globalization, where you have this much international economic presence, we've never seen global corporations pull out of a country quite like what we've seen in the last week.

In that sense, they're more comprehensive, they're more intense than anything we've ever seen. The thing I'm most worried about is that we're not asking Vladimir Putin, "Oh, get rid of your nuclear weapons or come back to the table." We're saying, "You need to change your view on what is an existential threat to Russia," just given his own rhetoric. He has basically staked his own political future in Russia on this idea that Ukraine is an existential threat and he's protecting Russians from it. I'm very concerned that the ask, if you will, that we're making with sanctions is not one that he can meet and stay in power.

Brian Lehrer: I saw a tweet, was it you or was it-- As I was reading up for this interview, somebody tweeted, "Vladimir Putin has been canceled" because of the breadth of the private sector sanctions.

Heather Hurlburt: I'm not the person who originally came up with that, but what's actually crazy is you have Russians trying to appeal to right-of-center Americans by invoking the metaphor of canceled culture. We're also seeing, this morning, Russian bots coming out and pushing on mass the message on US social media that these sanctions are going to hurt Russian civilians.

Frankly, we know from that, that these sanctions really are biting, and that the regime is really scared because they wouldn't be bothering to try to use our metaphors and social media channels to push back against and divide our society if they weren't really afraid. It is also a fact that these sanctions are hurting ordinary people. You alluded to this in your intro, but imagine getting an email from your bank that said, "If you don't pull all your money out right now, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to give you your money." That's the kind of thing that's been happening to Russians this past week.

Brian Lehrer: We had David Remnick on the show yesterday, editor of The New Yorker, and somebody with deep experience reporting in Russia himself. I was asking him if he thought some kind of compromise to bring peace needed to be made with Vladimir Putin, painful as that would be, maybe something about the more Russian leaning eastern provinces of Ukraine, or I don't know what. I'm not advocating anything in particular, but whether there needs to be some kind of diplomatic negotiated peace that gives him something to end the amount of death that's taking place in Ukraine, and David said he doesn't think so. At least not yet because these sanctions might actually work this time.

Then I had a couple of listeners who tweeted, "Hey, remember South Africa, the sanctions against South Africa." That, of course, was a big thing when I was coming up, maybe when you were coming up, sanctions against South Africa and the movement to sanction South Africa for the apartheid regime. When I was looking at this Washington Post article from 2014, 13 times that economic sanctions really worked, some of them go way back, but when I looked at the era surrounding that, it wasn't there.

1975 to 1976, the United States versus South Korea, 1976 to '77, the United States versus Taiwan, 1982 to 1986, South Africa versus Lesotho, that was South Africa applying economic pressure to make a smaller country return South African refugees. 1987 to 1988, the United States versus El Salvador. 1992 to 1993, the United States versus Malawi, very asymmetrical, big US power versus all these small countries. South Africa was not on that list. Did the sanctions against the South African apartheid regime bring down apartheid?

Heather Hurlburt: I actually think South Africa is in some ways a good analogy to what we're facing with Russia in that it's a large self-sufficient society. Quite Apartheid Era South Africa, for listeners who don't remember this as you and I do, really prided itself on its self-reliance, and its ability to go it alone in the face of the world.

Eventually, sanctions and other measures did help change the internal balance of power, but it took more than a decade. That's the first thing to say. It took a long time, a lot of deaths, scars in South African society that are not anywhere near killed, and even though not the kind of open warfare that you're seeing in Ukraine.

The other thing that happened, frankly, in South Africa was that geopolitics changed. The cold war was ending, and frankly, the West had propped up in many ways the apartheid regime on the theory that it was better than communism, and at a certain point, the leadership of white South Africa understood that with the decline of the Soviet Union, they weren't going to be able to count on that support anymore, so they better make a deal now. I don't see anything like that.

The only comparable thing would be if China, frankly, turns on Moscow at some point, that would be the comparable international pressure. That's the one big escape valve that Moscow has right now. Is to the extent that it can sell goods, sell energy, and buy goods, or bring in goods through China. That's its escape valve from Western.

Brian Lehrer: For you as a former State Department official, and now with New America Foundation as a foreign policy think tank, what do you think China's position is? What do you think they're struggling with internally, and will China get on board with the rest of the world? It was one of the few countries not to vote to condemn the Russian invasion at the United Nations General Assembly the other day, they were just five.

Heather Hurlburt: It's really interesting that China didn't vote to condemn it, but didn't vote against it and didn't use its veto in the Security Council. It let Russia veto in the Security Council.

Brian Lehrer: China abstained.

Heather Hurlburt: Yes. On the one hand, Moscow is an ally of Beijing's and Beijing does not like NATO. Does not like the amount and variety of military pressure that the US and its allies are able to exert through NATO and would be very happy to see Putin administer a defeat, a pushback to NATO, as I think Putin originally envisaged.

On the other hand, Beijing is very sensitive about the idea of not changing borders by force. Interestingly, it doesn't think that Ukraine is the same as Taiwan, because it thinks Ukraine is an independent country, recognized at the United Nations, whereas it says Taiwan has no status.

For Beijing, this is awkward, and it, on the one hand, is happy to support Putin. Maybe is even happy to see Putin a little weakened so that he understands he's not a peer of Beijing, but also not interested in being dragged into a mess or being embarrassed and made to look bad. On the other hand, the longer this goes on, the more the US is distracted from competing in Asia.

I'm not super optimistic about China being willing to fully get on board with anything that looks like a US-led initiative, or the resurgence of US power over Russia, but I also don't expect to see it get fully on board with what Putin is trying to do, because, frankly, as you intimated, it makes Beijing look bad.

Brian Lehrer: Now, sanctions, we have to acknowledge, have collateral damage, and ultimately, it's the common Russian who's going to be hurt the most, the common European is also going to be hurt, the common American in certain ways. The Putin apologists on Fox News, those there who are, this is all they repeat, "Why are we doing this to ourselves? Economic sanctions are going to hurt Americans," but economic sanctions are going to have collateral damage on people who are not Vladimir Putin, or his oligarchs. Again, for you as a former Clinton administration official and think tank thinker now, how do you come up with a moral equation and the right answer?

Heather Hurlburt: One of the things that you've really got to do is, as much as you can, to cushion the blow for people. What you can do to keep oil and gas prices down to where you can quickly move to alternate energy sources to do that, to use the resources of government to help support people to really work with the private sector, which, frankly, has some discretion over how much they raise prices, and as you say, to keep us all in it together.

The other piece that makes the moral equation very challenging is, do you try to push as hard as you can, as fast as you can to get it over with quickly, even if, on the other side, that risks escalation and even more people dying? I don't want to sound like I think there's an easy or obvious moral equation here. The key point to make or anyone who tells you there's an easy and obvious moral answer is just not thinking hard enough, because the terrible tragedy of this, kind of what Putin has chose to do, is that thousands of people are going to die no matter what we do.

Brian Lehrer: How does this war end?

Heather Hurlburt: You've seen this, there's, I think, a variety of options, which combine in different forms, but one is that Putin loses power, which, frankly, at this point, is the logical import of the sanctions that they cause someone in Moscow to say, "This is ridiculous, we want to be able to back away from this and Putin can't."

Another is that some of Ukraine is absorbed into Russia, and some of Ukraine is left as a rump state, and you can imagine better and worse outcomes of what that looks like. From only Crimea and the two little microstatelets that Moscow attempted to create to Russia trying to hold more territory going further west.

I must say, with things having gone as badly as they have up to now, I don't see any prospect of Russia being able to take and hold all of Ukraine, and at some point that will sink into Moscow's thinking, but I also don't see any prospect of Ukrainians stopping fighting as long as Russia is holding significant slabs of Ukraine, and that, as I said, means that suffering and death go on for quite a while.

Brian Lehrer: Heather Hurlburt, director of the New Models of Policy Change Program at the New America Foundation. She worked in the Clinton administration for the State Department and as a Special Assistant to President Clinton. Thank you for your knowledge and thoughtfulness. We really appreciate it.

Heather Hurlburt: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, more to come.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.