Deploying military force against another country’s aircraft is certainly a warlike act, and arguably, in the strict legal sense, an act of war. Aleksander Lukashenko, who has kept Belarus in a Soviet time-warp for three decades, has rejected, in the most spectacular way, all notions of territorial jurisdiction, international law, and, indeed, common decency.
Free passage for neutral vessels is one of the oldest precepts in diplomacy. We call violations of that precept “piracy” and treat them as military assaults. The first proper foreign war launched by the young American republic was declared by President Thomas Jefferson against the corsairs of the Barbary Coast in 1801.
HEALTH OF ROMAN PROTASEVICH, CAPTIVE JOURNALIST IN BELARUS, IN DOUBT FOLLOWING ‘HOSTAGE VIDEO’
What, though, are we going to do about it? What practical steps can law-abiding nations take against the putrid Belarusian autocracy that recently forced down a passing airliner in order to arrest a passenger? It is not an easy question.
Imagine a spectrum of options. At one end is Jefferson’s solution: Get together an international coalition, knock Belarus’s conscript army out the way, topple the dictatorship, and put Lukashenko behind bars. At the other end of the spectrum is to do as little as you can decently get away with — summon the Belarusian ambassador for a dressing down, support a condemnatory U.N. resolution and issue a strongly worded press release.
Where on that scale is the optimum point — the point at which one can exert the most pressure at the least cost? Reasonable people might offer different answers, but one thing is beyond doubt: Trade sanctions are not the solution.
Economic embargos are, as a rule, worse than useless. They hurt all the wrong people, ordinary folks in the other country and in your own, while propping up the dictators. A state under sanctions develops a siege mentality. People rally to even the most authoritarian regime.
Fidel Castro used to admit, in private, that the American blockade had kept him in power by allowing him to blame the “yanqui” siege and not socialist economics for the miseries and privations of the Cuban people.
The same dynamic is at work in Belarus — as well as its sly and fitful protector, Russia. Vladimir Putin’s regime has been under a range of Western sanctions since 2012 — sanctions applied in response to the death of Sergei Magnitsky in 2007. That has not stopped him, in the meantime, from invading Ukraine, sending his agents to carry out an act of murder in the United Kingdom, carrying out a kidnapping on Estonian soil, and seeking to hack into U.S. voting machines. His Belarusian client has also been under sanctions, especially since the 2020 election — which was rigged with unusual brazenness, even by Lukashenko’s grim standard. Has that improved his behavior?
At the time of writing, the only sanction so far applied by the European Union is a travel ban: The national airline, Belavia, has been denied European airspace, and European carriers are boycotting Belarus. But since Lukashenko and 60 of his top officials are already banned from entering the EU, this is no deterrent at all.
So, if not trade or travel sanctions, then what? One option would be to tighten sanctions as if against an enemy belligerent in time of war, aiming to inflict damage regardless of cost. Many of the instruments of financial transactions are privately owned Western companies: Visa, Mastercard, SWIFT. Denying all Belarusian and Russian banks access to their networks would cause chaos — although, in all probability, it would make their leaders even more popular as their peoples became more wounded, patriotic, and defensive.
Another option would be to go more robustly after the people responsible for the various atrocities. We could allow Eichmann-style judicial kidnappings, snatching the officials who ordered or carried out assassinations in the West or diverted civilian airliners and bringing them to trial on our own soil. We could even seize the assets of their immediate family members who live in the West, although this would amount to an admission that we are truly in a state of conflict.
What we cannot do, at least not if we have any self-respect, is decree more economic sanctions in the hope that they will generate positive change. They will not, and politicians know that they do not. Prohibiting your firms from doing business in another country has become a lazy way to signal your dislike of that country. When someone demands sanctions against Saudi Arabia or Israel or China, all they’re really saying is: “Look at me! I am a good person who disapproves of this regime!”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Rogue states such as Belarus present us with a choice. We can decide that it’s not our business to intervene and find ways to live with them, or we can seek to depose their leaders. Let’s not pretend that economic sanctions are a way to avoid that choice.
