Western powers are tightening the screws on Russian President Vladimir Putin: The next move appears to be a phased-in European ban on purchases of Russian oil.
It is the right policy, given that oil money is financing Putin’s war in Ukraine and keeping the Russian economy alive.
However, the risks could be substantial: Revisionist powers have sometimes become most violent when campaigns of economic strangulation against them are about to succeed.
The classic example is Japan before World War II. For a decade, Tokyo had been seeking a vast empire in Asia. It had embarked on a military rampage, seizing Manchuria, invading
Economic sanctions are working now against Russia as they squeezed Japan before its war with the U.S. But the historical lesson is that they don't make adversaries less aggressive.
Middle-East Arab News and Opinion - Asharq Al-Awsat is the world’s premier pan-Arab daily newspaper, printed simultaneously each day on four continents in 14 cities
by Tom Lewis
The Decision to Drop the Bomb
This book, aimed at the 75
th anniversary of the Atomic Bombings and the end of World War II in the Pacific, is really out of its time and place. Author Tom Lewis (
The Empire Strikes South) wants to reframe the bombings, picturing them in a positive light. His whole message is really in the title – the bombs “saved” millions of people. There was a time for this argument, in the middle 1990s when the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in the United States sought to put on display the
Enola Gay B-29 aircraft that had dropped the A-Bomb on Hiroshima. Then historians, veterans, politicians, and anti-nuclear activists fought over the terrain of both the act of displaying that airplane and the propriety of using the bomb. Lewis missed that debate. Today, he would have done better to stay out of it.