Speaking at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, US Senator Rand Paul said that imposing sanctions on Russia, China and Iran has failed to change their policies.
The senator said he was regularly asking the following question to Department of State officials: ‘'just tell me any kind of behavior that’s been modified by China or by Russia, or by Iran. In fact, if you look at Iran it’s sort of the opposite. In fact, I would argue the sanctions don’t work at all. The only sanctions that work are if you offer to repeal them, in fact. But what we tend to do is: we put more on, and more on, and more on,” he continued.
“And, to my knowledge, I don’t know any that were removed. In the Iran agreement there were some sanctions that were going to be removed and were removed, but with Russia and China we’ve been doing this for five years, some of these for 10 years with both countries. I’m not aware of any that we’ve removed,” Paul added.
“But the thing is, there is another alternative and it’s called diplomacy,” he said. He called on the US to engage diplomatically with countries, instead of imposing more and more sanctions. Speaking against plans to use frozen Russian assets for Ukraine, Paul said, “We claim we are going to take it. We might have the ability. We have amazing controls over the banking system. But at the same time if we take it: do you think Russia is just going to crumble?”
“So we’ll take their sovereign wealth, and they’ll take all the private wealth that’s over there. I don’t think it gets us more towards a solution,” Paul explained. “But once you do it, it’s almost impossible to go backwards..”
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