Sanctions

Eighty-three years ago World War II began. Hitler fabricated an excuse to attack Poland. It was not acceptable for the Germans to invoke a mercurial reason to invade their neighbors. It is always advisable to show yourself as the victim.

An SS unit pretended to be attacked by Polish rebels in the border town of Gleiwitz, and war raged on for six harrowing years. That “false flag” operation cost the world 60 million deaths and some 350 billion dollars of the time.

Today Russia intends to repeat the same thing to swallow Ukraine, only that it is much more difficult to achieve. With satellites, drones and intelligence services, there is no room or opportunity for cheating.

There is also no estimate of how many dead or how much money a third world war will cost, but it must be infinitely greater than in World War II. It is enough to know that a single American atomic submarine has more destructive capacity than the entire war fleet of that conflict.

Along the way, punitive systems are being developed so as not to have to resort to war. The great powers, logically, are terribly afraid of nuclear bombs. Hence the threats. The best known are the “sanctions.” According to Bob Menéndez, the popular and powerful Democrat senator from New Jersey, if Russia tries to gobble up Ukraine, the committee he chairs (Foreign Relations) will impose “the mother of all sanctions” on Moscow.

If the current sanctions already cost the Russians, according to two researchers from the Atlantic Council, more than 2.5% of annual GDP, how much would the bill for “the mother of all sanctions” amount to? I don’t know, but it would be a huge amount, and it might deter Putin from launching the invasion.

Supposedly, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union share the opinion that sanctions are adequate. Unfortunately, Germany has broken ranks and seems to be going down another path. It took once an attitude that was exemplary at the time – the closure of all its atomic plants after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.

That reaction has left the country without many exits to the looming energy crisis if Russia is denied use of the gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea, Nord Stream 2, which has cost Moscow $11 billion. The other route is the old gas pipeline, through Poland and Ukraine, nowadays two declared enemies of Russia.

At the same time, Germany is searching for an inexhaustible and cheap source of energy provided by neutrinos, which looks like something from a science fiction story, but which is being pursued by many German scientists. At least theoretically, the conversion of the constant bombardment of these tiny particles from the sun to a usable form of energy is already solved.

In any case, sanctions are a magnificent weapon to fight drug trafficking and corruption. It happens, however, that the corrupt themselves use sanctions to try to destroy their enemies.

I remember a former Guatemalan president, Alfonso Portillo, who spent several years in prison in the United States. He was accused of corruption after finishing his term, but when he was in the government, he accused an honest political consultant before George W. Bush, asking for “sanctions” against him, who was not in his political group.

The consultant – Julio Ligorría – defended himself and explained what was happening to the US ambassador Otto Reich, a remarkable diplomat, who thoroughly investigated the consultant and was totally exonerated.

Except for the cases of personal revenge, such as those that existed in the Guatemalan “National Commission on Monitoring and Supporting the Strengthening of Justice,” the CICIG, created in that country as part of the peace agreements. It was entrusted to the UN, which did not make a good job. However, in general it was worth the effort. They had been killing each other for more than three decades.