Angry Planet - A Brief Apology and a Discussion of Sanctions

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Once upon a time, an enemy would pull up to your gates with his army and surround your city so that nothing could get in or out. In a short time, you’d be eating the horses, maybe the rats and, if things got bad enough and you weren’t entirely suicidal, you’d open the gates. Sometimes that would work out OK. Sometimes not.Nowadays, countries wanting something from each other seem to have more options, but one that’s still around is the siege. We just call the sanctions. To discuss sanctions, their effectiveness and where they are currently applied by the United States, we are joined by Ambassador Daniel Fried. Fried spent a lifetime working at the state department, is an expert on sanctions, and is now at the Atlantic Council, a prominent Washington think tank. He’s got a new paper coming out on Nov. 17 with recommendations for the incoming administration.You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, Angry Planet listeners. It's Matthew. We don't have new episodes this week for you much to our chagrin. We are going to play something here. It's an unlocked episode from 2020 about the use of sanctions as war. But let me explain what happened this week. You know, if you haven't been following the news, Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday. We had episodes, one in the tank, and one planned to release. The first one after the invasion occurred, the guest and I had a heart to heart. It was not his urging, but kind of more of it, mine that we decided that perhaps the subject matter of the episode was inappropriate, given the current circumstances. and so we decided to shelve it. The second episode we had planned,

the guest was unavailable because of the instance this week. Jason and I both have been run pretty ragged in our day jobs. As you know, I'm a staff writer at Vice Motherboard, and I'm kind of one of the guys that knows conflict pretty well. And so I've kind of gotten rolled up into more of the Vice News team proper and have been hitting a lot of the news stories as they've been coming out and kind of doing the breaking newsbeat, which can be pretty exhausting. And, you know, I have friends and colleagues in Ukraine.

And I've been watching all this very closely and being very state tuned into the news. Jason literally just started a new job as deputy editor at the week. Kind of a hell of a first week, you know, for something like this to happen. And so we kind of come to this weird point at the first time in our podcast history where we don't have anything for you right now because I've unprecedented things in history. So we apologize. We do have some things planned. It's just been, you know, we're a show that doesn't do hot takes.

It would be very easy for us to jump on a call for 30 minutes and just kind of bullshit for half an hour about what we think's going on and make a prediction about what we things going to happen and kind of, you know, regurgitate news stories to you. But that's what cable news is for. That's not why you come to Angry Planet. That's not what we do. We do cold takes. We do analysis.

We want to let, you know, intelligent people come on and have weird and bizarre conversations. And there just wasn't room for that for us this week. Like I said, we had to kill one of them. And I hopefully maybe one day, several months from now, probably won't re ever air. what we recorded, but I will touch base back with the guest and we will record something else. And I think when you hear that, you'll understand why we perhaps thought it was a bad idea to float that particular episode. You know, as I'm sitting here recording this, it's 4 p.m. on Friday.

I've actually been a little bit tuned out from the breaking news side of things for the past hour, kind of finishing up something I was writing on kind of a retrospective on the javelin missile and why it's been so important for this war and why Ukrainians have kind of made a saint, a Mary Magdalene figure that's holding one of these javelin missiles. I've been writing about the Russian economy. I've been writing about the cyber war. I had other shows I had to do this week.

It's been a little wild. So we apologize and what's coming down the pipe? Sunday we're going to be talking to a gentleman that's going to be kind of walking us through the U.S. intelligence, the lead up to the war that had been coming in since November, and how much of it ended up being shockingly accurate as far as what's happened. And then Jason has said that he's going to be able to get that out Sunday, so we will have that.

And then on Tuesday night, we're talking to Mark Galiati. If you're a fan of the show, you know that he's been on quite a bit, and he's kind of one of our Russian translators. He has a new book out that's kind of about the Russian way of war, and we're going to have him on to talk about the domestic situation in Russia. I mean, this is one of those things where another reason I didn't want to put anything out too quick this week is because I listened to a lot of podcasts about international relations and about war and these kinds of things. And a lot of them have face planted this week. I've watched them put things out that would completely invalidated within 12 hours. The turnaround time for this stuff just isn't enough, I think.

And I think this is an inadequate medium for breaking news unless you have a big, powerful news organization behind you like the New York Times, say, to produce something like the Daily, which we just don't have. And so again, I apologize, but we are working on it. We will get you some stuff. I'm going to be working through the weekend on some things and be following all of this. You know, follow me on Twitter at MJ Galt to see kind of the latest in when I'm working at advice. Jason is JQ Fields on there.

And we will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. But until then, here is an old premium episode from 2020 about the use of sanctions as a weapon of war. I hope you enjoy this. Oh, that light at the end of the tunnel? Yeah, that's China. And when they get out of that tunnel, China will lead them alive. this Russia-Chinese alliance, yeah, Russia's the junior partner in any such alliance and they know it. That's not a comfortable situation for them.

They're also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know, we don't know. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country almost with impunity, and when it is near to complete, and we'll talk about intervention. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Welcome to Angry Flint. I'm Jason Feud.

And I'm Matthew Galt. Once upon a time, an enemy would pull up to your gates with his army, surround your city, so that nothing could get in or out. In a short time, you'd be eating the horses, maybe the rats, and if things got bad enough, and you weren't entirely suicidal, you'd open the gates. Sometimes that would work out okay. Sometimes not.

Nowadays, countries wanting something from each other have more options. But one thing that's still around is the siege. We just call them sanctions. To discuss sanctions, their effectiveness, and where they are currently applied by the United States, we are joined by Ambassador Daniel Freed. Freed spent a lifetime working at the State Department, is an expert on sanctions and is now at the Atlantic Council, a prominent Washington think tank.

He's got a new paper coming out on November 17th with recommendations for the incoming administration. Ambassador, thank you for joining us. Thank you. A lifetime. Well, 40 years. For a lot of people that is elected. Happily, not quite a lifetime. But when I left the Foreign Service, I was the Seventh Service. I was the senior Foreign Service Officer in terms of length of service. That's because the Trump people had fired so many of my colleagues.

Yeah, that certainly made the news quite a bit. Well, talking just specifically about sanctions, we like to start off with some very basic stuff. And could you just tell us a bit about how they work and how they're targeted nowadays? Well, sanctions have been a tool of U.S. foreign policy since the administration of Thomas Jefferson, who thought that we could impose trade sanctions on the European powers and they would respect us more. It didn't work out so well. But sanctions in their current form took shape really after 9-11. When the Bush administration, started looking at ways to dry up sources of financial flows to terrorist organizations. And it increased the sophistication of its sanctions operation and really beefed up the part of the Treasury Department, OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, to conduct sanctions.

And it got a lot, both the Bush administration and then the Obama administration got a lot smarter and imposing sanctions. Smart sanctions, you know, so-called as opposed to dumb sanctions, but they actually got pretty good at it. I was not, by the way, a sanctions person. My last job in government was the State Department sanctions coordinator. That was the first time I had worked seriously on sanctions. And the Trump people not only abolished my office, but they scattered all of its people. So that, that, office no longer exists. Maybe the Biden administration will put it back. Was there a justification given at the time for why it was broken apart and scattered?

Or did it just happen? Oh, in the kind of willful chaos of the Trump administration, there wasn't a lot of thought given to a lot of things. This one was not Secretary Pompeo's idea. You remember, Rex Tillerson was the first Secretary of State. And he made a lot of, frankly, ill-considered moves to straighten out the State Department organizational chart, the Oregon chart. And he abolished a lot of things that shouldn't have been abolished. It was just strange because, in fact, the Trump administration has continued the Obama policy of turning to sanctions as one of the early, if not the first foreign policy tool of choice. And to do that effectively, you need to give Treasury the resources

it needs, because they really run most of the financial sanctions, but you need state department competence and sanctions, and my office was supposed to supply that. So go figure. That's a long list of Trump administration decisions where you're scratching your head and wondering, what were they thinking. And by the way, I'm not a partisan person. I work in the Bush administration, in the Bush NSC for four years, and I was the Bush Assistant Secretary for Europe. So I worked for Clinton. I worked for Bush, worked for Obama. I'm not partisan. I just don't like dumb policy calls. I feel like in the next year or so, there's going to be a lot of venting of the spleen that happens on this show. It's just my guess, I think. So vent away, we totally understand.

Trust us. Sanctions are a legitimate and useful tool. They're not a cure-all. You don't snap your fingers impose sanctions and the other guy runs up the white flag. That doesn't happen. But there are useful and legitimate tool. And what kills me is that the Trump administration sometimes, frankly, had the right idea on some sanctions policy. I'll give them credit. But they couldn't follow through consistently because sanctions have to be married to a policy that otherwise makes sense and is consistently implemented. One of the rules of sanctions, and we can get into this, is, I tell you what I mean, one of the rules of sanctions is don't get greedy and don't get impatient, by which I mean don't think that you can

demand everything and that because you've imposed sanctions, you'll get everything and don't get impatient. Look, there is an enormous amount that you can accomplish in foreign affairs if you're not in a hurry to do it. You can get a lot done, but it's not going to happen, usually, according to the timeline, you've put in your memo to the president or the secretary. Like, it's okay, sir, do this and it'll be done in time for your reelection. It doesn't work that way. But if you are patient, you can often achieve a great deal. That's the lesson of the Cold War.

We achieved our maximum objectives. It just took us 45 years to do it. Can you give me an example of Trump administration sanctions that you thought were a good idea, but they weren't. Okay. North Korea. All right. So let's roll back the tape of the Obama administration. Look, the Obama people outsourced North Korea sanctions policy to the UN Security Council.

They had a series of Security Council resolutions and they negotiated with the Chinese. They did something. it wasn't an empty policy, but it wasn't commit, it was not on a track commensurate with the speed of the developing North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile capacity. There was a gap. And the Obama people first sort of pretended that the, the Security Council resolution route would be sufficient. And then in the last six months, six, eight months, they realized it wasn't. And to the credit, to the Obama people, they sort of gulped hard and finally gave my office, the sanctions office, licensed to start thinking about much heavier sanctions. And we did, working with Treasury. And by the way, the Treasury people all through Obama, including Obama political appointees of

Treasury, were in this space for a long time. Okay, they wanted to do more. So we handed that over to the Trump people and said, look, you're right that the Obama people didn't do enough on North Korea sanctions. And they said, well, what do you think of maximum pressure? And we said, great, and here's your menu. Here's what you can actually do. And they started doing it. And it got the North Koreans attention. And this made sense. It was a Trump administration sanctions policy that actually made sense. And then what happened? Trump goes for the cheap win. He goes for this, this flashy summit in Singapore with Kim Jong-un, and he agrees to a meeting, and then he agrees to some weak statement of general principles,

which was actually weaker than things the North Koreans had previously agreed to and then broken. Like, what were they thinking? So they took a solid set of intensified sanctions, applied it, They were right, okay? The Trump people were right on maximum pressure. And then they squander it all because Trump wants an easy win. Like, it just killed me. And then after it blows up and after it's clear that we've gotten nothing, they've lost maximum pressure.

And maximum pressure is not easy because let's strip it away. what it really means is leaning on the Chinese to put more pressure on the North Koreans. Okay, if you're going to do that, and you can, you better be serious with the Chinese and not fight with the Chinese about everything. So what do you want from China? Well, the Trump administration, remember I said, don't be greedy and impatient. They wanted it all. They wanted it immediately.

You're not going to get everything, and you're not going to get it immediately. And no matter how much the president wants it or his partisan staff, and it's not just Trump, all presidents are guilty of this to some extent, but they usually get smarter. Trump never did. No matter how much you want it, you're going to have to make choices. Can we talk a little bit about what maximum pressure looks like versus minimum pressure? I mean, because those are the terms that I'm really familiar with. But I'm not as clear on exactly what steps we're talking about. I mean, I at one point read that Kim Jong-il's cognac was on the list of sanctions.

So he allegedly couldn't get that and his Mercedes and, you know, things like that. But what actually are we talking about? If you're talking about maximum pressure, well, maximum pressure means different things in different cases. Okay. But since you raise North Korea, it's a really good example. I remember the last, you know, when we could finally get the Obama people who were doing North Korea policy to start thinking about maximum, you know, ramping up the sanctions. Simple principle, follow the money. What are North, don't go after, you know, coniac or luxury imports. Come on. What are North Korea's major exports?

Those are fisheries, textiles, coal, and labor, by which I mean they send out North Korean citizens to work in foreign factories. And 90% of their wages are sent home to the state. And, you know, it's so bad in North Korea, it's still a good deal for the North Korean workers. Okay, they still sign up for this stuff. So go after them. And that means going after the exports of textiles, fish, you know,

fish, coal, labor means also going after the Chinese and getting them to knock it off. And I'm not putting it in diplomatic terms, but that's what it means. It also means going to the Russians. It means going after African countries, South Americans, wherever the North Koreans are active. And it means sustained efforts. The Obama people did some of this. They sure did. I mean, they really worked it in New York, you know, with skill and diligence.

I'm not mocking them. But maximum pressure means going after the money, and it means making it clear to the Chinese that we're serious. But you then have to make, as I said earlier, you have to make the choices about what it is you really want. There are two kinds of foreign policy problems. The problems you want to solve. And the problems you say you want to solve. Those are two different things. And if you want to solve North Korea problem, solve that means limiting, you know, in theory, eliminating the ballistic missile and nuclear capacity of North Korea.

That's the deal. You know, what is it we're willing to do? What is it we're willing to put on the table? This is not easy. There were a lot of smart people in both the Obama and Trump administrations who were trying to deal with this in an honest way. Trump got in the way, as I said. That doesn't mean that it's going to be easy for Biden. But at least he won't get in his, you won't have Biden going out and blowing up a perfectly reasonable policy because he's in a hurry for a cheap victory that he hasn't earned.

but it's also a matter of not just sales but it's also you know what north korea can sell but it's also a matter of what north korea can buy too right i mean it's also a matter of what's coming in and one thing that i found interesting is that humanitarian aid seems to have continued at the same time sanctions have gotten tougher i mean is that is that common i mean i guess we no longer try to starve our enemies into submission but it it does seem interesting that, you know, we're helping and hurting at the same time. Well, okay, now you've touched on one of the, the serious dilemmas of sanctions policy. In theory, you want all pluses and no minuses in your policy tools. You don't want risks. You want to pretend that there aren't any. It's never like that.

There are always downsides. There are always risks. There are always choices. sanctions are not supposed to include humanitarian assistance. They're supposed to have carve-outs for that. They're also not supposed to include sort of information, newspapers, media. They're supposed to give space for that.

But it's humanitarian that's the toughest. That is especially a problem when it comes to Iran. Sanctions are going to hurt people. you know, in your press release, you can deny it or you can say it's all, you know, the other guy's fault, and you may be right. But you have to own the consequences of your policy, and then you have to be serious about facing that, and then you have to be serious about humanitarian carve-outs. You have to make it possible for food and medicine to get through. And I know the Treasury people, the OFAC people who administer sanctions wrestle with this all the time. It's not easy.

And they do so in an honest way. There are going to be these kinds of consequences. Now, having said that, you can mitigate them. It's particularly tough with North Korea because of the nature of the system and the brutality of the leadership. You have to recognize the problems and then mitigate them as best you can. It doesn't seem to me an indictment of sanctions to recognize that. But you have to be serious about working with humanitarian groups and getting that kind of dialogue going. So your language, your public statements about respecting humanitarian trade are not just rhetoric.

I'm not sure the Trump administration cares at all about that stuff. I know the Obama administration did, and I know that the people at OFAC at Treasury who administer sanctions do care about it. And it'll be a challenge for the Biden administration. They're going to have to look at, they'll look at sanctions policy, and they'll wrestle with these things, and they will come up with solutions that are imperfect, but a lot better than nothing and not trying at all. This speaks to one of the arguments that I often hear against sanctions, and you kind of touched on it there, that it gives a political win to, or it can give a political win to the regimes

that the sanctions are against. Specifically, I'm thinking about like Russia and the foodstuffs from Europe. You know, Putin has this big press conference where he dumps all the cheese and the bread and the fruit into the garbage and mows over it and now the Russian cheese industry is supposedly booming, we're told. Are there instances where sanctions can backfire and create good press for these regimes that we don't, that the U.S. doesn't care for? And how do we, how do you mitigate that risk? That risk is there, but it's exaggerated. Now, you raised Russia, so let's take it. I was deeply involved in the design of the Russia sanctions. They actually were reasonably effective. They have hurt the Russian economy without causing starvation. They,

They have hurt Russian cronies. They have hurt economic growth. That's just what they were intended to do. The message was, if you start invading your neighbors, you're going to pay a price. They started a war. Now, the blowing under of cheese is not exactly, that was not exactly a win for the Putin administration. They look pretty done. That was perfectly good food and people knew it.

The Russian economy has been stagnant for, several years. And dissatisfaction in Russia is growing. Russians use the term stagnation to describe the current situation. Well, if you know Soviet history, you know that stagnation was also the term used at the end of the Soviet period before Gorbachev. Like, yeah, don't tell me that Putin is good. This is late, this is late decadent Putinism. That's what it feels like. But that's not me talking. And those are a lot of Russians talking. That's what they say. Sanctions have contributed to the sense in Russia that Putin has driven the country into a darkening and narrowing little tunnel.

Oh, that had light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, that's China. And when they get out of that tunnel, China will lead them alive. This Russia-Chinese alliance, yeah, Russia's the junior partner in any such alliance and they know it. That's not a comfortable situation for them. And, you know, the sanctions against Russia were intended to sharpen the choices, not just for Putin, but for the, you know, the Russian political class generally. You can engage in aggression, but we're going to push back. And if you do that, you're not going to be able to enjoy the fruits of integration with the world economy.

And these are not U.S. unilateral sanctions. The Europeans joined us. I mean, I know I was the Obama administration negotiator with Europe on the Russia sanctions, and it was actually a very productive set of negotiations. Like the Europeans stepped up. And we were, thanks, frankly, to Tony Blinken, who was then Deputy Secretary of State, who's now close, you know, he's on the Biden team, I had the perfect negotiating position, which was basically freedom to do deals with the Europeans, handshake deals.

at the table with the Europeans. As long as I had Treasury and Commerce and everybody else alongside. So the Obama people handled that really well. They gave me what I need. We worked with the Europeans. The Europeans stepped up

and we had a pretty much united front on sanctions against Putin's aggression, which Putin did not expect. He did not expect. He did not expect. He thought the Europeans would cave. And the Trump people have been, shall we say, inconsistent on Russia policy, but they've generally continued the sanctions.

You know, it's not been great, but they've done all right. I think Congress blocked them from removing the sanctions, which they might have done, but that's a whole other story. That's Trump and Russia policy. That's for another podcast. This is also with Russia's where we have the Magnitsky Act, right, which is supposed to target individuals in a regime. rather than the regime as a whole. What do you think about the Magnitsky Act? And do you think it's been effective? Well, okay, full disclosure.

I had just started a sanctions coordinator when the Magnitsky Act passed, so I was the first person who tried to implement it. And it was such a hot potato. It was so nervous making that the Russia hands at the state were happy to have me do it. It actually was very effective

because it enabled us to target individuals who were guilty of the persecution and eventually death of this lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was killed because he'd uncovered corruption, which eventually turned out, as it turned out of Putin link. But it also allowed us to go after other human rights abusers in Russia. It was so successful that Congress passed something called the Global Magnitsky Act, allowing for individual sanctions against people outside Russia for sort of the same kind of stuff. Massive corruption or massive human rights abuses. And it actually is very clever because it allows you to go after individuals without declaring a sanctions regime against a country,

which has its downsides. Global Magnitsky is something that the European Union is thinking of implementing and other individual countries are thinking of implementing. It's actually a pretty good tool. And I will say this. The Trump administration implemented the Global Magnitsky Act in a pretty capable fashion. And I'm going to give a shout out to a Trump administration, former senior official, Segal Mandelker, who is the Undersecretary of Treasury in charge of sanctions as well as some other things, really believed in human rights sanctions as a legitimate the tool. And she did, she and her people did a really good job, but I got to give her credit. Like, somebody can, you know, it's counterintuitive if you haven't, if you don't pay attention,

that a senior official in the Trump administration would take a really strong and productive position on human rights and mean it. Like, really? But yes, she really did. I mean, she deserves, you know, I'm saying this because a lot of people who, who served in the Trump administration may feel tarnished. But some of them, she's one of them, or, you know, Chris Krebs, the former Undersecretary of Homeland Security is now in kind of the election protection business with DHS. He's been debunking, you know, disinformation about election fraud.

I mean, he's another one. There are a lot of Trump administration political appointees who have done honorable work for the country. And I, you know, I'm no fan of the Trump administration, which should be obvious. But, you know, I do believe in government service, and there are people who have done honorable service under what we can call difficult conditions. Anyway, so Global Magnitsky, to circle back, was something the Trump administration implemented. It could have done, I think they would have done even better had the Trump administration been more consistent on human rights. But that's okay. They did honorably and they gave the Biden the Biden team something to work with.

So, well, I mean, the target of any sort of Magnusky action would have to be pretty corrupt, right? I mean, don't they have to have a large amount of wealth? Yeah, that bar has to be high. You can't use it in a trivial way. And one of the reasons the Obama Treasury people were so wary of the Magnusk of Global Magnitsky Act. was exactly this. They said it'll be used that administrations will be pushed around by basically special interest human rights groups. And they were worried it would be used in a profligate or undisciplined manner. And I get that. It wasn't that the Obama treasury people didn't have an argument. They did. But it turns out that maintaining a high bar is possible. So one of the basic questions I have, just to go really back to the basics, when a country uses sanctions, are, how close are sanctions to war or as a tool of war?

Do you see them as a precursor or something that can work by itself? No. They are a tool of what should be called economic state crimes. which is a fancy sounding word for putting pressure. Now, what are the other tools of economic statecraft? Well, technology controls. In other words, restrict exports of certain kinds of technologies. Like, do we really want to be sending high-tech stuff to China or Russia?

You know, probably not. How about military technology? Mm-mm. All right, that's one tool of economic statecraft. Another tool of economic strait craft is transparency. Uncover the channels of dirty money. Like really hidden LLCs in Delaware with hidden owners? Why shouldn't benefit, ultimate beneficial owners of real estate

or purchasers of high-end art or, you know, the owners of, of fancy, mysterious LLCs be known, uncover this stuff. Stop allowing dirty actors to try to undermine our system in their day job and then otherwise park their money in the U.S. or financial system or the U.S. or British real estate,

London real estate markets. Like, what the hell? Those are tools of financial statecraft. And I think that they are being, I think the Obama people started it. Pause on the Trump administration, because obviously financial transparency is not big in the culture of this particular Oval Office,

but I think the Biden people will be heavy into it. They'll really be about anti-corruption. That's what sanctions are part of. It's not a tool of war. It's a tool of financial statecraft. And we should, the United States, with the Europeans, the Canadians, others, you know, Singapore, you know, Japan, South Korea, should upgrade the financial rules to start pushing out the bad actors, the corrupt actors,

the dirty money. And, you know, open up the art market. That's another channel for hiding, you know, laundering money. You know, transparency. folks. That's, you know, sanctions are a tool like, like that. It goes after bad actors. It has its limitations. It's not easy. Sanctions and other tools of financial statecraft have to be married to policies that make sense. You can't, sanctions are not a policy. You know, when people used to come to me as sanctions coordinator at State Department and say, you know, we want sanctions. I'd say, what are you trying to achieve? What's your policy?

Sometimes it couldn't answer the damn question. And I tell them that think harder and come back. But if you know what it is you want to achieve and it's practical, you know, our Iran, we haven't talked about Iran much, the Trump administration's Iran policy is we want everything right now. The Obama policy was, we want a nuclear deal. sanctions got us a nuclear deal. They didn't fix all the problems with Iran. They shouldn't be expected to.

Sanctions aren't going to fix anything, but they can fix maybe something. That's what I mean by wedded to a policy that makes sense. What is it for trying to achieve? Is it realistic? Can sanctions help? And that's why, you know, that's what I did as the sanctions coordinator.

I'm not a technical sanctions person. and I learned a lot about it, but I'm not one. But I did have a lot of experience in actual, you know, foreign policy. What works, had some experience of what doesn't work, too. And sanctions can help if you know what you're doing. So what are your recommendations for the incoming administration? Well, read my paper coming out on November 17th. A bunch of do's and don'ts, but you already know.

like don't get greedy, don't get impatient. Give Treasury and OFAC the resources it needs. I never worked there so it's not self-serving. But the U.S. taxpayer should know that's a really capable bureaucracy. Do you know what it's like being able to count on a piece of the U.S. government to deliver and get it right? Do you know what a relief that was? if OVAC said we can do this, they could do it. If they said this will work, it pretty much would work,

which meant when they said, this is dumb, I tended to believe them. They're highly competent, but they're under-resourced. Put people there, give them the resources, and work with other countries. Unilateral sanctions are costly. the Europeans have discovered that sanctions can be a useful tool. Work with them. And, you know, don't start thinking with sanctions or anything else

that you can snap your fingers and the Europeans will fall in line. That's not how it works, not how it should work. Come up with a consensus. Push it forward. Work the politics in Europe on sanctions or anything else. and then keep your word. Do a handshake deal and keep the deal. And if you get the Europeans on board,

U.S. and Europe, you'll pretty much carry the G7. You know, that means the Japanese come on board and the Canadians. You do that, you have the high ground in the world financial system. And you haven't wasted a lot of American political capital. if you do it alone and lean on people, you can get away with it, but you're going to piss people off, and that is going to weaken your overall policy objective. I'm not saying never do unilateral,

but that's your last choice. Anyway, the paper I wrote distills that gives a lot of case studies, but it follows the discussions we've been having, because that's what goes on. You know, those are the real issues. Thank you so much. Thank you.