Sadly to the point. I feel for Iranians in Iran (I know many, whether they call themselves Persians or Iranians as expats is their choice and I respect that).
Having had the opportunity to meet the former in their homeland so so long ago, many Americans do not understand how grueling the sanctions regime system is for average Iranian citizens in their everyday; this is sadly a minor example as I saw based experiences a decade ago. It does not impact government officials as much as we hope, and the citizens are far, far less empowered to force government change to break free of a system sanctions hopes to disincentivize (I will not even waste time here, Google and look, even recent attempts lead to backlash).
As a Westerner, and a lover of HN, I would love to see data-driven examples of sanctions actually working. Was South Africa are only positive example from US sanction strategies? I will go look, but this is one of many examples in Iran of us causing resentment and confusion for citizenry and not really helping. (For Americans, this is a not a red-blue problem if we talk long-term approach, all political parties have sided with sanction strategies in the long-term for a while: Cubans and Iranians we have punished and it has not really seemed to help us _in the long-term_ shifting their governments and policy objectives, but I would love to see evidenced counterpoints.)
The first time I was struck by this perverting are efforts in explaining open society to citizens of countries with indifferent governments was a decade ago, when SourceForge did the same thing. We respect the rule of law, but to spite the faces of democratic cultural principles. Oh well.
What non-violent (yes, there is violence inherent in sanctions, but it is a rather different scale than war) alternative would you suggest for punishing a foreign country?
EDIT: I see this question has been asked in other threads, but not answered. Whether Iran should be punished is a separate question (one on which I am personally too ignorant to hold an opinion about) from how should one country punish another.
Well in the case of authoritarian regimes, I would imagine trying to pump more information from the free world into it would be a more effective "punishment" that restricting information. In practice though that's hard. Most authoritarian regimes have state censors/firewalls to filter only information that is advantageous for the state.
China (hell, vaccinations/flat earth too) has shown that this isn’t terribly effective. The ‘west’ has been pursuing a policy of “if we enlighten them, they will revolt”, and it ain’t happening. Some have been enlightened, others have had their own biases strengthened, and the government has simply continued unchanged.
> What non-violent alternative would you suggest for punishing a foreign country?
It is not for the US to "punish" other world states, even if "Iran should be punished".
If you, or your state, believe some kind of sanctions are in order, there are international bodies and forums where this can be discussed and decided upon: The UN security council, international courts, and other more specialized bodies, some of which can make decisions which constitute sanctions.
Why should one country not allowed to enforce a policy for companies/individuals who live in/are incorporated in that country against another country, without the UN being involved?
This whole article is about a US company enforcing US rules.
> This whole article is about a US company enforcing US rules.
Not really. GitLab is an international entity regardless of where it is registered, because it presumes to be a platform for (some forms of) interaction and information sharing for people in many countries. It is implicitly agreed between users and the entity behind the website that it is accessible and usable by everyone.
> Why should one country not allowed etc.
It is not about "allowing", in the sense that I'm not in control of the US and what it does, we are discussing what is morally acceptable. And it is not morally acceptable for individual states to disrupt people's lives using the aspects of inter-dependency of people, groups and organizations across state boundaries - except according to norms which are accepted and defensible at the global level.
Countries are not people (they are made of people). Punishing them makes little sense. If one wants a country to behave some way, one should think of how to make it happen, and what's the cost to everyone involved.
Sanctions should never be part of a punitive system, which at the level of a whole country is inevitably unjust. They should only be part of an incentive system, where you hope to steer the other country to the direction you want. Looked at it this way, we wouldn't ask ourselves whether sanctions are warranted. We'd ask ourselves how effective they are.
Oh, and there's this question of whether a country should have the right to influence another country to begin with. Not gonna answer that one here.
> there's this question of whether a country should have the right to influence another country to begin with
Are sanctions influencing another country, or limiting how companies and people from the sanctioning country interact with foreign entities?
> They should only be part of an incentive system
Has an incentive system between countries ever been implemented and worked? For a specific what-if, is there a way that we could have realistically "incentivized" Cuba to disassociate with the USSR?
In the US and I agree. Sanctions are disgusting and work contrary to their goals. Ostensibly they put pressure on the governments of sanctioned countries, but in reality they strengthen people's ties to their governments while completely choking out regular people and especially the poor.
I don't think imposing sanctions has worked to our advantage ever, in any country, in the past 50 years we have used them. And in many, they have backfired, e.g. Iraq in the 90s. That isn't even to mention the hundreds of thousands of innocent people who lose their life. [1]
Yet, sanctions are considered to be "soft" and "dovish" by politicos and the general public. It's stupefying.
Having had the opportunity to meet the former in their homeland so so long ago, many Americans do not understand how grueling the sanctions regime system is for average Iranian citizens in their everyday; this is sadly a minor example as I saw based experiences a decade ago. It does not impact government officials as much as we hope, and the citizens are far, far less empowered to force government change to break free of a system sanctions hopes to disincentivize (I will not even waste time here, Google and look, even recent attempts lead to backlash).
As a Westerner, and a lover of HN, I would love to see data-driven examples of sanctions actually working. Was South Africa are only positive example from US sanction strategies? I will go look, but this is one of many examples in Iran of us causing resentment and confusion for citizenry and not really helping. (For Americans, this is a not a red-blue problem if we talk long-term approach, all political parties have sided with sanction strategies in the long-term for a while: Cubans and Iranians we have punished and it has not really seemed to help us _in the long-term_ shifting their governments and policy objectives, but I would love to see evidenced counterpoints.)
The first time I was struck by this perverting are efforts in explaining open society to citizens of countries with indifferent governments was a decade ago, when SourceForge did the same thing. We respect the rule of law, but to spite the faces of democratic cultural principles. Oh well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073903