The West, addicted to sanctions against different countries, quietly begins to lose out of sight the fact that sanctions do not get along with the principle of free trade. In 2008-2009, the United States could make the whole world "buy its crisis." In the short term, it was a very effective solution. Today, the U.S. economy is gradually dying, choking on unemployment and fiscal imbalances.
Europe can be different. Many people not only in the "new," but in the "old EU," for example, in the south of Spain or Greece, can only dream about the conditions that the Russians live in. About 35 percent of people living in those countries are unemployed vs. five percent of unemployed Russians, concentrated in several "depressed" regions. The amount of salary of a Moscow trolleybus driver for a Greek, Romanian or Bulgarian citizen seems enormous, taking into consideration the fact that many drivers of public transport in Moscow are Central Asian migrant workers.
The West invented an amusing way of dealing with economic stagnation: to change the methodology of international statistical calculations. They account for prostitutes' services in the calculation of GDP. Moreover, IMF and the UN unscrupulous "statistics experts" and "experts on grants" seriously consider an opportunity to consider marital sex as "losses of income." If a man did not have sex with his wife, he would go to prostitutes, and the money that he would spend on them would then be accounted in the calculations of GDP and national income. This is no joke. There was such a proposal, it was discussed, but not yet adopted. Not yet.
It is indisputable that the possibility of applying political, economic and trade sanctions come into sharp conflict with WTO principles and humanitarian ideas. Putin noticed that right: sanctions are a double-edged weapon, they are mutually disadvantageous: "Is it not a fact that economic sanctions as an instrument of political pressure in today's interdependent world have a boomerang effect and ultimately affect businesses and economies of the countries that initiate them?"
Some sanctions are generally unacceptable from a moral point of view. One can not, for example, impose sanctions on the supply of medications, as was done in Syria. Today, the Kiev junta has managed to do it against their own people, preventing the supplies of insulin to Donetsk and Lugansk. Among other things, according to the Geneva Convention on the prohibition of torture, denial of medical aid is considered a kind of torture.
The norms of the World Civil Aviation Organization do not allow sanctions on the supplies of spare parts for aircraft, but in practice, such sanctions were often applied. In the end, Japan was forced to declare war on the United States, Great Britain and Holland, precisely because of the sanctions on oil supplies.
In practical terms, people have learned to bypass trade sanctions easily, and it is only international speculators that win from them. For example, under the Shah's regime in Iran, the United States delivered a model of an export warplane to the country that the Americans could not sell elsewhere. Despite all sanctions introduced after the Islamic Revolution, including the ban on the supply of spare parts for aircraft, these aircraft still fly, which can only mean one thing: American companies produce, supply and continue to supply spare parts to Iran bypassing all sanctions. China has been under sanctions since 1989, which did not stop its economy from developing by leaps and bounds.
From the point of view of private international law, sanctions against citizens of this or that country are not only unfair, but also illegal: without a fair and impartial trial there can not and should not be punishment.
In economic theory of liberal international financial institutions - the IMF, World Bank and others - there is a possibility provided within the scope of global economy for any company to refinance itself in the country, which at this particular moment gives best conditions. Given the scale of large industrial and financial groups, it goes about hundreds of millions and billions of net savings. It actually goes about the change of world financial order.
The rules of the global game are changing, but the U.S. and the EU are not ready to honest and open economic competition, and it is their sanctions that become an obstacle for a new global economic order to appear. They, however, forget that the choice of the dollar and the euro as the means of international payments is conventional in nature. That is, they are used only as long as countries agree to use them (or as long as the U.S. and the EU can impose their currencies by force, beliefs, traditions, sluggishness of financial or monetary authorities, or something else).
In this situation, Russia can automatically become one of the leaders of non-aligned states, and make the economic existence of developed countries rather uncomfortable. The principles of international trade have not been fully defined - WTO negotiations in Doha would not finish. In the West, they managed to spoil relations with China, taking a clearly unfair decision on export quotas for rare earth metals from China.
So far, however, the pressure on Russia is purely psychological in nature. The euro and the U.S. "political class" will not seriously fight with Western "masters of life" - major monopolies that are interested in collaboration with Russia under the condition of ongoing recession. They fight for the Russian market, and Russia looks like a rich and damn beautiful (but moody) bride.
In the beginning of the year, it was agreed between the President and the Prime Minister that Putin would personally co-coordinate economic issues, trying to prevent the looming threat of recession. The economic philosophy of the president is understandable since his premiership: risk management or minimization of risks play an important role at this point. He thinks in these categories.
And those who threaten Russia with sanctions, should keep this in mind, for it could end badly for them otherwise.
Saeed Gafurov
Pravda.Ru