Sanctions and threats losing effectiveness.

 U.S. POLICY HAS UNITED ITS ADVERSARIES

RESULTS OFTEN COUNTER PRODUCTIVE

The United States now has sanctioned most of Asia with either primary or secondary sanctions. India has been a target, a country that sought neutrality from the global political conflicts, has refused to give up its nation's well being by honoring those sanctions. Sanctions that attempted to cut off Russia's sales of energy to India and raise the cost to India. China has recently forbade its refineries from obeying U.S. sanctions against Iranian and Russian oil. 

While India and China are the biggest countries not obeying sanctions and often costing them with trade with the U.S., they perceive that their countries best interest is to not get involved in these sanction schemes. The one principle for inclusion in the BRICS economic union is not engaging in sanctions on member countries. This represents over 50 % of global trade. 

While countries like Iran, Cuba and Venezuela have been under sanctions for over 50 years the Ukraine war and the attempts to isolate Russia led to sanctions exploding to all over the globe. After 4 years, Russia is still selling oil, even to the EU and Ukraine, while the diminished supply has devastated the economies of Europe. The incentives to buy oil from Russia has increased for India and China and has actually strengthened their relations in other ways.

Sanctions, while damaging those nations it targets, has become increasingly less effective, because nations resist damaging their own economies by enforcing sanctions. 

When santions become ineffective the next step is military action, enforcing embargo's,  capturing ships at sea or damaging nations oil infrastructure, all acts of war. Europe and Russia are now on the brink of war and we can expect either a cessation of these actions or war is inevitable.

While the U.S. has, so far, suffered little by imposing sanctions, we can expect that there are plenty of avenues for even nonmilitary retaliations. One that has been evident in the last few days is the large increase in yields of U.S. debt. This could be by BRICS nations no longer buying U.S. debt plus Gulf countries in need of cash to compensate for their lost oil revenues, caused by the Iran war. The yield on the 10 year is now 4.67% and on the 30 year 5.19% . This will dramatically increase the cost of servicing this debt and will increase the deficit of the U.S. budget. This may only be the first shot in retaliation in the economic warfare that has been underway for years.