Greg Scoblete noticed another flaw in Bromund’s critique of Mazower:

What’s missing from Bromund’s litany is the one thing that could potentially improve humanity’s lot – trade policy. Strengthening commercial ties between nations does not guarantee peace, harmony or the flowering of democratic governments. It certainly hasn’t – yet – with China. But it does improve people’s living standards and their material well-being and could, over time, lead to pressures for reform. Better still, strengthening trade does not require Washington bureaucrats and think tankers to anoint political winners and losers in countries whose cultures, customs and internal dynamics they simply do not understand. No need to drop-ship liberal institutions – they can grow, if they can grow, organically.

This is right, and we should emphasize that Bromund’s list of alternative actions in between armed intervention and full acceptance of the status quo includes nothing but punitive measures. Actually, Bromund does refer to trade indirectly when he calls for economic sanctions, but his proposed economic response to abusive governments is typically negative. Whenever a foreign government is doing something outrageous to its own people, we always hear calls for this sort of punitive measure that does nothing for the people being abused and tends to make the state stronger vis-a-vis the people. Economically integrating authoritarian states more fully into a system of international trade is not going to eliminate conflicts of interest between their governments and ours, and it may not lead to political reform for a long time, but we know for certain that cutting these states off from the outside, impoverishing whatever middle class the country may have had, and forcing the population to rely on corrupt officials and black marketeers for goods do not improve matters at all.

The less integrated in the global economy a state is, the easier it is for that state to resist and ignore outside influence, and the more sanctions Western nations impose on a state the greater the incentive for other major and rising powers to fill the void left behind by departing Western investment and businesses. Every time Washington imposes economic and financial sanctions on this or that authoritarian state, it is actively denying the United States added influence and leverage in the future. Many Iran hawks seem to believe that it is Iran we will be isolating and weakening by imposing increasingly stringent sanctions on Iran, but ultimately it is U.S. influence that will be weakened and all of the other major and rising powers in the world that will gain. Sanctions will cause difficulties for the Iranian people, but the Iranian state will become stronger and become even more firmly locked into the orbit of other powers, which will make it even harder in the future to bring international pressure to bear. This doesn’t serve American strategic interests, but it also does absolutely nothing for the dissidents who are suffering under the current Iranian government. It is also the inevitable result of punitive policies aimed at isolating other states in futile efforts to compel changes in regime behavior.