Why do US sanctions fail? Because a platypus can’t become a bird

Democracy is under threat worldwide. One of the most comprehensive multidimensional measures of democracy, the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, notes that today 72 percent of the world’s population lives in autocracies and only 13 percent in liberal democracies, with 42 countries autocratizing — further removed from democracy — in the past year.

However, such an approach takes a snapshot of current characteristics, ignores the various ways regimes became undemocratic, and generates unrealistic attempts to push regimes towards democracy.

Some regimens don’t respond because they are platypus.

In biology, phenetic classification assumes that we can look at different organisms and categorize them based on a snapshot of their characteristics: birds have beaks; mammalian lactate; reptiles can be poisonous. Still, the duck-billed platypus has a beak, lactate, and is venomous. Phenetic categorization doesn’t always work.

In contrast, cladistic or evolutionary approaches follow the branching tree that begins with single-celled organisms and becomes modern-day birds, reptiles, and mammals. The platypus may have some features of birds and reptiles, but its evolution follows the path branching out to become mammals, so the platypus belongs to the mammal family.

When we think of regimes, we are wise to follow evolutionary paths. In particular, the branching tree to be considered is the left or right legacies of different governments.

Ideally left-wing governments stem from revolutionary and anti-colonial histories, achieved power with promises to redistribute wealth and lift the poor, were tied to labor and other lower-class social movements, and opposing patterns of racial, ethnic, gender and other exclusions.

Ideally right-wing governments have their roots in colonial powers, gained power with promises to support international capital and its local allies, were linked to business associations and landed elites, and supported dominant group identities against minorities.

Countries do not arbitrarily follow one path or another. The history of regimes is traced through critical moments, moments of decision when social forces converge to institutionalize an option along the left or right evolutionary branch.

Countries that go to the left do so because groups of workers, peasants, women, indigenous and minority groups come together around anti-colonial and transformative projects. Countries that take the right path do so because colonial elites, domestic elites and dominant identity groups shift to the right evolutionary branch.

Some of these governments may evolve over time and take on similar non-democratic characteristics. This tempts us to characterize them as similarly undemocratic and pursue similar responses, but their split at a critical moment in the past is important as we consider how to move them away from undemocratic rule today.

For example, our increasingly precise measures tell us that countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, the Philippines are flawed or non-democratic countries, just like apartheid South Africa.

The phenetic approach observes shared characteristics, such as unfair or uncompetitive elections, restrictions on civil society, and attacks on the press, and might even view them as similar in their degree of being undemocratic. Still, it would be a mistake to approach them with similar answers.

I deliberately mention apartheid in South Africa because many support the idea that broad sanctions and international isolation can work.

Yet broad sanctions and international isolation have done nothing to help Cuba move towards democracy, even after more than 60 years of brutal embargo. The US currently applies broad sanctions on more than 35 other countries, causing dramatic humanitarian suffering but no democratization.

The reason is that apartheid in South Africa originated in the correct evolutionary path. Sanctions isolated the regime from the very community that defined its evolution: Western governments and capital, domestic elites and dominant white racial groups.

In contrast, while broad sanctions are destroying economies and causing unnecessary deaths in places like Cuba and Venezuela, isolation from the West has not affected democratization in these countries. They may have similarities to right-wing dictatorships, but their evolutionary path is on the left branch and policies must be sophisticated enough to know the difference.

Non-democracies that originate on the right evolutionary path can be pushed toward more democracy if their Western benefactors stop supporting them, but non-democracies that originate on the left cannot.

For countries that originated on the left-wing evolutionary path, attempts by the US and other Western governments to isolate them play into the hands of leaders who use sanctions to polish their anti-Western credentials, even if they have long since ceased to lead anti-colonial leaders. . conflict. Further, they can point to Western isolation as the cause of the economic collapse and the suffering of the population, even though they have long ceased to represent the poor.

Too often the US is under the false impression that the path to democratization lies in a shift from the left evolutionary path to the right evolutionary path. Yet a platypus will never evolve into a reptile. A non-democracy that originates in the left-wing evolutionary path will not democratize by switching to the right.

A country that has strayed from the left-wing evolutionary path is democratizing by deepening its transformation project and embracing the lower-class groups that put it on the left-hand path to begin with. International solidarity can bolster these social forces by exposing deviations from the leftist evolutionary path and mobilizing the core supporters who are the source of legitimacy for such governments. This really supports popular movements in these countries and pushes them back to the left evolutionary path and democracy.

Unfortunately, this rarely happens for two reasons. First, part of the blame must lie with the international left, which is hesitant to criticize governments that trace their roots to the left-wing evolutionary path, even if they have strayed. Still, the Russian invasion of Ukraine should be a lesson – the international left should be sophisticated enough to criticize both the US imperial project that encircled and threatened Russia and the immediately genocidal Russian imperial project that seeks to seize territory from Ukraine .

The second part of the blame falls on the US government and the foreign policy establishment, which are too afraid of left-wing popular movements and too easily seduced by potential right-wing allies.

Take Nicaragua. Once a beacon of revolutionary transformation, the Nicaraguan government has adopted the worst features of a patrimonial autocratic regime. An uprising by students, women, farmers and workers in 2018 opposed efforts to curtail pension payments and may have pushed the government back to the left and towards democracy.

Yet the movement quickly captured the imagination of the US foreign policy establishment, which saw in the protests an opportunity to put Nicaragua on the right evolutionary path. As a result, the Nicaraguan government responded with repression, portraying the opposition as henchmen of the American empire.

The US government has a role to play in pushing governments back to democracy, but only in regimes that have emerged from the correct evolutionary path. For such governments, US sanctions and pressure would strip away vital support and push them back to democracy. This is what happened in South Africa; the apartheid state aligned with the US suddenly lost the support of its main benefactor. Similar pressures to democratize from the US could work in other countries that are already on the right evolutionary path, such as Poland, Israel and the Philippines.

Instead of ineffectively exerting pressure on countries that have followed the left evolutionary path, causing serious humanitarian damage in the process, the US should focus its democratization efforts on places where its support plays a vital role, such as those countries that have followed the right path .

A platypus cannot become a bird, but it can become more like other mammals.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.