Donald Trump wants the war in Ukraine to end. Volodymyr Zelensky wants the war in Ukraine to end. Many other presidents and prime ministers want the war to end. Vladimir Putin is not one of those presidents. The war in Ukraine has become the political, psychological and economic center of Putin’s regime.
That basic asymmetry would seem to doom any attempt at a negotiated peace — it is, in fact, the main reason no meaningful peace negotiations have occurred in the three and a half years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Trump thinks he has a solution, though. He says he intends to use his negotiating prowess and keep ratcheting up economic pressure until Putin has no choice but to stop the fighting.
Between the bombastic social media posts, the shifting deadlines, the erratic announcements — one day a White House official says Trump will meet with Putin only after Putin meets with Zelensky, another day Trump drops the requirement — it’s easy to overlook the fact that Trump’s policy toward Russia largely follows the same failed strategy employed by the Biden administration, the first Trump administration and the Obama administration before that. For more than a decade, the United States has responded to Russian aggression by threatening and gradually imposing economic sanctions. That some of Trump’s sanctions take the form of tariffs doesn’t alter the nature of the policy.
The conventional theory behind sanctions is that economic pressure destabilizes regimes, possibly forcing the leader to change course. In one scenario, widespread hardship — unemployment, inflation, shortages — leads to popular discontent, even unrest. In another, a shrinking economy and loss of access to foreign markets anger the elites, who stage a palace coup or at least compel the leader to change direction.
The problem with this theory is that it’s wrong. When sanctions have an effect, it is usually to immiserate ordinary people. The elites remain wealthy, and the gap between the rich and the poor only grows. Rather than foment resentment against the regime and the elites, this tends to rally society against the country that imposed the sanctions. That enemy, after all, is far away and easily turned into an abstraction, while the elites at home control the media, which frames the conflict. They also control the jobs and the goods, making it much costlier to hate the elites at home than the enemy far away. And beyond a certain level, hardship leads people to withdraw from even thinking about politics, because they have to focus on survival.
As for the palace coup scenario, Russia has shown clearly how sanctions come to have the opposite of their intended effect. Superrich Russians living abroad who found their access to Western markets cut off and some of their assets frozen moved to places like Dubai or returned to Moscow. What else were they going to do? That the economic pie is shrinking doesn’t mean that the elites suddenly start conspiring to overthrow the leader — a risky proposition unlikely to succeed in the best of cases; it means only that they compete harder for what remains of the pie.
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