Democrat administrations bet very hard on sanctions as the ultimate tool of the international world order.
Sanctions are not a very good tool. It’s hard to find any particularly effective examples of sanctions working to change behavior or prevent a war. The only thing sanctions are any good for is limiting the scope of the damage that a smaller country can do, but even there it’s often a mixed bag. Even when the sanctions are effective, like those that FDR imposed on Japan, the response wasn’t peace, but war.
Threatening Russia with sanctions over the Ukraine is a particularly weak argument since Putin has much more to gain from controlling the Ukraine and its energy options.
Biden is promising the best or worst sanctions ever, but Russia has been sanctioned often enough with no results.
Sanctions are no match for soldiers and if Putin decides to invade, he’ll do it. If anything, the WW2 history of Germany and Russia deciding to carve up Eastern Europe makes it abundantly clear that diplomatic pressure and the fiction of an international community is just that.
A fiction.
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