I don't know the answers to those questions, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was "yes".
https://washingtondc.jhu.edu/news/do-sanctions-actually-work...
Sanctions or lack thereof definitely impacts quality of life, but Putin put everything on a war economy footing pretty quickly anyway, and in that environment (especially in Russia), it’s suffering all the way down. And Russia excels at Suffering. Russia has oil too, and plenty of minerals, so if anything I expect by now they’re just getting stronger (economically), barring Ukraine wrecking their shit from time to time with a well placed drone strike.
Iran/Israel is an interesting question, but near as I can tell, Iran doesn’t really want to destroy Israel. They just want to make them as miserable as possible, and show they can ‘do harm’ to them when they need to prop up domestic support among the hardliners.
Israel provides a good scapegoat for the Iranian leadership.
With Israel gone, who is the Ayatollah going to use as the big bad? The Great Satan (USA) isn’t as tractable a target when they don’t have a designated ‘local’ they can go after, and if Iran actually meaningfully hurt the US (nuked the White House?), Iran is glass regardless of how otherwise strong they are.
NK got sanctions because they love playing the crazy-dude-with-a-gun-that-just-wants-a-handout, which is also why they eventually got nukes. They might have gotten nukes a little faster without sanctions, but sanctions definitely gave the hardliners huge leverage in the country. Hard to be friendly with the west (as a civilian!) when the west is literally openly starving the country, even if the leadership of your country is egging them on eh?
Near as I can tell, the USSR fell because of jeans and rock and roll. So yes, I think the ‘good guy’ sanctions BS is ultimately self defeating.
It can work if someone is either a) in a tenuous economic position, and b) the ‘sanctioningish’ behavior is not existential.
But any good authoritarian would rather throw their entire population under the bus ‘for the greater good’ than give in on something important for them…
And countries know how to deal with being at war (generally), even if it’s a weird only-semi-economic one.
Basically, you are hurting your own economy (non negligibly in the EU-Russia case for example!) to make sure that you outgrow the sanctioned opponent, making any future conflict more favorable for yourself.
There is a lot of evidence that this aspect works pretty well; even if you can sidestep the sanctions with middle-men or substitute local industry, this always comes with additional friction/costs (just consider German synth fuel industry during WW2-- that was an insane amount of ressources that could've gone into planes or tanks or somesuch instead).
For an example of sanctions directly effecting diplomatic outcomes, just consider Jordan over the Gulf wars: They stayed neutral during the first one (which Bush did NOT like), got sanctioned (without western citizens even noticing too much), suffered a lot from that, then during the second Iraq war they basically cooperated with the US (grudgingly!).
I think it is difficult to find many clear examples for this because sanctions typically mostly work as a threat, and being put in place is a kind of failure mode for them already.
Russia went from selling their oil on the world market at competitive prices to selling to mostly 2 customers at heavily discounted prices. And Russia is going to use barter now because of financial sanctions on Russian oil buyers.
All Russian currency reserves are frozen, and the interest these reserves generate are given to Ukraine to buy weapons.
How is Russia economically better now than before Feb 2022?
Russian industry is operating at only 81% capacity, largely due to labor shortages, which make sense considering that about 1% of its labor force join the military every other month. Russia is losing tank barrels, artillery barrels, and infantry fighting vehicles more than 10 times faster than it can manufacture new ones. It will likely never be able to obtain a third rotary forge, required for barrel manufacture, to expand its capacity. It has almost entirely cannibalized its old, defunct Soviet era stock. They are being kept afloat by China, NK, and Iran, but with a much-reduced capacity, and often much lower quality. For example, Russia relies on China for 70-80% of its microchips, but China is dumping defective microchips on them with a 40% failure rate.
Sanctions have absolutely had significant, direct, measurable impacts on Russia’s ability to wage war and sustain war.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/11/21/half-of-russias-ai... https://jamestown.org/program/russia-exhausts-soviet-era-arm... https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-where-are-russias-... https://archive.ph/c17pk https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/is-202... https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-sanctions-have-reshaped-ru... https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme... https://osintforukraine.com/publications/microchips https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/russia_china_semicond...
Russia?
