As Russia invades Ukraine, the Biden administration is responding with a typical and ineffective strategy: sanctions. We’ve tried this time and time again with no success. Even the Russians have openly stated sanctions are a waste.

The Russian UN ambassador said, ‘We’ve been sanctioned so many times, we’ve lost count, we’ve learned to live with it.’ And he has a point.

It’s not whether they deserve to be sanctioned or not. I probably think they do, but it’s that we in the West and in America really never get our act together when it comes to sanctions. 

The Senate, for example, has been working on a sanctions bill, and they just managed to not come up with one. There wasn’t any real partisan disagreement, but they couldn’t decide on what sanctions to impose. 

Then you can think back to the sanctions before the Iraq war. We imposed them on Saddam Hussein who had broken UN Security Council resolutions.

They seemed tough, but our European allies, particularly the Germans, simply found a way of getting around them. They had something called the oil for food program. Saddam sold the oil to the Germans and supposedly money that was going to be used for food for the Iraqi people. Instead, it went into Saddam’s pocket and those of his family and his henchman.

Then in 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine before he took Crimea, which is a peninsula in the Black Sea, on the Southern coast of Ukraine. 

President Obama said, ‘We’re imposing sanctions, this will not stand.’ Well, here we are eight years later, and it’s still standing. Those sanctions didn’t work. 

Or then there’s the famous Iran sanctions. Yes, we’ve tried to sanction Iran, but we never seem to be able to stick to it. Most recently, the administration announced that it will end its sanctions on the civilian part of the Iranian nuclear program. There is no difference between the civilian and the military part of the Iranian nuclear program.

It’s just a way of us kind of weaseling our way out of the sanctions we’ve imposed. 

So what we have here is a long-term failure of sanctions because we basically will not stick to them and nor will our allies. I don’t think the sanctions are going to work.