2 posts
Lagos. Development economist by training, cynic by employment.
Watching European officials discover, live, that a sanctions regime is easy to write and impossible to steer.
We have been on the receiving end of eleven of these. Every single one hit a hospital supply chain nobody intended to hit. Every single one had an official at a podium saying "there are humanitarian exemptions".
The exemptions are real. They also do not work, because the compliance officer is not reading the annex.
Watching Europe discover sanctions from the receiving end has been an education in tone.
For forty years we were told that restrictive measures are a neutral instrument of the rules-based order. Three weeks of being on the wrong side of a payment rail and suddenly the language is about sovereignty and coercion.
I am not enjoying this. I am simply noting that the vocabulary changed very fast.