Performing Escallatio on the Russians

Forgive the headline — it’s from a gag Tom Lehrer used introducing one of his songs. But here’s the latest on our sanctions against Russia:

The new U.S. sanctions, to be outlined in detail later on Monday, will add more people and firms to a list announced last month of figures whose assets are frozen and who are denied visas to travel to the United States.

The European Union is also expected to add targets to its Russia sanctions list on Monday. Ambassadors from the 28 EU states met in Brussels and an EU diplomat said they were expected to add around 15 new names.

Since nobody actually wants to see Ukraine carved up by a brute, you really want these sanctions to work. But wishful thinking does not a foreign policy make, especially when, as the story notes, the sanctions don’t include “curbs on the Russian financial and energy sectors, that would do the most serious damage to Russia’s economy.”

Curiouser and curiouser is Professor Ditherton Wiggleroom’s promise that he’s holding the really very serious sanctions “in reserve.”

This is the diplo-economic version of the “escalation” tactics Lyndon Johnson’s Whiz Kids, including failed SecDef Robert McNamara, used against North Vietnam — raising the stakes each time North Vietnam raised the stakes. Bigger bombings, more troops, whatever.

But tit-for-tat actions rarely work. For starters, they allow your opponent to dictate the pace of escalation, robbing you of the initiative. Secondly, they give your opponent time to either learn how to endure your new efforts or develop workarounds.

Escallatio was a total failure, replaced by Richard Nixon’s using hundreds of B-52s to bomb the ever-loving bejeebus out of the North. Because that’s how you win. Colin Powell devised his formula for “overwhelming force” directly in opposition to the painful lessons he learned firsthand under McNamara.

I’m not saying sanctions can’t work, but the longer we dither, the less likely they are to work.

Forget Vietnam for a moment — that was was more than ten years ago and fought with old-timey weapons. But have we learned nothing from Iran?