On the menu today: The Biden administration’s favorite foreign-policy tool, trade sanctions against hostile regimes, sound good when they’re announced, but they aren’t a particularly effective form of leverage because the world is full of smugglers, third parties, and poorly monitored ports of entry; President Biden feels increasing pressure to get federal employees back into the office; and the managers of the Empire State Building choose to stab New York Giants fans in the back.

For Brutal Regimes, This Is a Profitable World

A sanctions regime is only as effective as its enforcement. Because Western leaders don’t want to fight wars — for good reason! — they tend to prefer trade sanctions and export bans as their favorite tools of deterrence against the world’s most ruthless, brutal, and criminal regimes.

The problem is that a determined foe with deep pockets can always find ways to evade those sanctions . . . and almost all of our foes are determined and have deep pockets.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal delivers the scoop that China’s top nuclear-weapons laboratory, the state-run China Academy of Engineering Physics, has managed to obtain sophisticated semiconductors “made by U.S. companies such as Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp. since 2020 despite its placement on a U.S. export blacklist in 1997.”

Once you start looking for accounts of leaky sanctions regimes, you start to see them everywhere.

In India, “Upstart companies . . . have snapped up aging oil tankers to replace Western-owned ships no longer dealing with Russia. That parallel fleet is helping Moscow get crude to buyers in Asia, according to shipping executives, brokers and vessel-tracking, ownership and insurance data.” Russia and Iran are “constructing a new waterway-railway route from Russia-occupied territories in Ukraine to the southernmost ports in the Islamic Republic,” and late last year, Iran prepared “to hand the Kremlin the blueprints for its most effective weapon against the West: the underground financial network it relies on to evade sanctions.”

Off the coast of the Koreas, a Russian tanker chartered by a South Korean company was spotted last month conducting a fuel transfer to a Chinese vessel bound for North Korea. Rand Corporation concluded that, “North Korea has become adept at evading sanctions that the international community has imposed on it” and North Korea’s smuggling and sanctions-evasion network is active in 38 African countries.

Panama’s Maritime Authority just acted against one-fifth of its shipping fleet for working with the National Iranian Oil Company to evade sanctions.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad uses shell companies to evade sanctions on his regime; in October 2021, Syria’s economy minister, Mohammad Samer al-Khalil, boasted that, “Evading sanctions has become a Syrian craft.”

Brian Nelson, the U.S. under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, is traveling to Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey this week, warning countries and businesses that they could lose access to G-7 markets if they do business with sanctioned countries.

It’s a big world, with a lot of ports of entry and a lot of countries not-so-committed to enforcing those sanctions. Customs officials and inspectors who can be bribed to look the other way can be found in almost every corner of the globe. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and Syria may not have a formal alliance, but they all have an interest in evading Western sanctions, and they all have resources the other countries could use.

No doubt it feels good for an official in Washington to get behind the podium and announce that they’re getting tough on the bad guys by imposing new sanctions.

Last week, while announcing expanded sanctions on the Wagner Group — the infamous Russian mercenary army — Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said that, “As sanctions and export controls on Russia from our international coalition continue to bite, the Kremlin is desperately searching for arms and support — including through the brutal Wagner Group — to continue its unjust war against Ukraine.”

Are the current sanctions against Russia “biting”? Sure, but so do mosquitos.* Western sanctions make Russia’s efforts to turn its resources into cash more complicated, but they’re only slowing it down here and there. The Economist summarized that its reporters had “spoken to a range of intermediaries in the oil market, and studied evidence from across the supply chain, to assess the effect of the sanctions and get a sense of what will happen next. We find, to the West’s chagrin and Russia’s relief, that the new ‘shadow’ shipping and financing infrastructure is robust and extensive. Rather than fade away, the grey market stands ready to expand when the next set of sanctions is enforced. . . . The fleet Russia can use to dodge the price cap now counts 360-odd ships, equivalent to 16 percent of the global crude tanker inventory.”

For a sanctions regime to work, it requires almost the entire world to buy in, and many countries just aren’t all that interested in punishing Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, the Iranian mullahs, Assad, or Kim Jong-un. There’s money to be made, and the risk of getting caught is low.

It would be a better world if sanctions were an effective deterrent or punishment, but they aren’t. Western leaders keep going back to the same well because it is the easiest and least politically risky option. It’s almost a mutual agreement between the West and rogue regimes; the rogue regimes denounce the sanctions and pretend the restrictions hurt them, and the West pretends the sanctions are working.

*Yes, yes, pedants, I know mosquitos don’t “bite,” they pierce with a proboscis.

Will Biden Ever Bring Federal Workers Back to the Office?

Last week in the Washington Post, I pointed out that it wasn’t just Republicans who a) noticed that most federal workers weren’t back in the office five days a week, despite President Biden’s pledge in the last State of the Union address that “The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person” and b) wanted federal workers back in the office on a regular schedule.

Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser declared in her inaugural address that:

The federal government represents one quarter of D.C.’s pre-pandemic jobs and owns or leases one third of D.C.’s office space. We need decisive action by the White House to either get most federal workers back to the office most of the time, or to realign their vast property holdings for use by the local government, by non-profits, by businesses and by any user willing to revitalize it.

This brought about the usual responses: that this is all driven by a hatred of federal workers, that Bowser is just a tool of greedy developers, that it’s not the job of federal workers to keep the D.C. economy running, that federal workers are much more productive at home (debatable), and that federal workers are more productive when they don’t have to spend so much time stuck in a miserable traffic-clogged commute both ways (likely the strongest argument in favor of keeping workers home).

I don’t go into downtown D.C. all that often anymore, which means it’s easy to forget just how empty the place is. On Friday, the Post published a detailed, in-depth report on just how quickly downtown D.C. is dying and just how many office towers and retail spaces are empty:

As the third anniversary of the pandemic approaches, downtown Washington is a wounded rendition of its once robust self. Even as more of the workforce shows up daily, many streets at the city’s core are pocked by vacant storefronts, moribund sidewalks and offices that, even on the busiest days, are just over half occupied. . . .
With most federal employees still working at home — despite the pandemic’s easing and Bowser’s pleas that the Biden administration require in-person work — downtown can still feel like a deflated balloon.
A couple of blocks from the White House, an encampment of 70 tents splayed across McPherson Square is occupied by dozens of people who don’t have homes. At Metro Center, a security guard sits behind the locked entrance to a handsome 12-story office building that remains empty eight months after its only tenant, the law firm of Williams & Connolly, decamped to new headquarters at the Wharf.
On Seventh Street between Indiana and Massachusetts avenues NW, a strip that includes the Capital One Arena, there are nearly 20 vacant storefronts, including those once leased by Urban Outfitters and Bed Bath & Beyond. At Gallery Place, a popular multiplex cinema — part of a chain of 39 theaters that are shuttering nationwide — is closing in February. . . .
What has proliferated, he said, is a regular crowd of marijuana dealers and users who have taken to congregating outside the Metro station at the corner of Seventh and H streets NW, a few steps from the Chinatown arch, as well as his building, where two-bedroom condos list for over $500,000. “It feels like the criminals have taken over, that young people can do whatever they want,” [Local resident Howard] Marks said as a man walked by smoking a thick joint.

The Post cited data collected by Kastle Systems, which measures traffic through access cards to determine that just 45 percent of workers are showing up at their downtown offices, peaking at 54 percent on Wednesdays and dropping the lowest on Mondays and Fridays. I remind you that back in mid September, President Biden declared that, “The pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”

(Also on Friday, the Post’s editorial board declared that, “The moment has come for the Biden administration to make good on the president’s call for federal workers to return to the office.” As much as I’d like to believe the supreme persuasiveness of my op-ed from earlier in the week spurred all this, it’s likely that the consequences of federal workers staying home are just getting too big for anyone to ignore.)

Can you convert an office building into condominiums or rental apartments? Sure. (If you live on the north side of the third floor of Dumbarton Place near Dupont Circle, I regret to inform you that there’s a good chance my old cubicle at Congressional Quarterly was where your living room now is.) But it is not a fast or cheap transformation, and when you design and construct a building for one purpose, it doesn’t always fit those other purposes.

Washingtonian magazine summarized:

Take a look at most downtown buildings and some problems are obvious. Many are smooshed between their neighbors, meaning they lack windows on at least two sides. They’re also typically much deeper and wider than standard residential construction — making the core of each floor cavernous, with no direct natural light. Then consider the complexity of adding hundreds of bathrooms and kitchens (not to mention the accompanying venting and plumbing), turning rooftops into amenity spaces, and rerouting elevators.

Bowser’s idea to convert office buildings into housing might work here and there, but it’s not a large-scale solution.

Look, President Biden, you have a choice. You can keep federal workers happy by allowing them to continue to work from home indefinitely. If you do that, you get the downtown of our nation’s capital looking a few overgrown plants away from the set of the post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us.

Or, you can be known as the president who helped bring downtown D.C. back to life, but that will require irking federal workers by asking them to show up in the office closer to five days a week.

ADDENDUM: Being a New York Jets fan brings an excessive share of disappointments. The team hasn’t been to the playoffs since 2010, hasn’t won a Super Bowl since before I was born, has only made the playoffs 14 times in 63 years of existence, has wasted the talents of great players, has hired some of the most infamously incompetent coaches in the history of the league, and has developed a reputation for bumbling haplessness. One of my favorite articles described the fanbase as “Talmudic scholars of defeat in all its forms.”

The New York Giants can boast more championships, more playoff appearances, and, most years, a reputation for toughness and tenacity.

But unlike the Giants, the Jets have never experienced the indignity and embarrassment of seeing the Empire State Building lit up in the colors of a hated division rival to celebrate that rival’s advance to the Super Bowl. As my new colleague Noah Rothman put it, “This is what being occupied by a hostile foreign power feels like.”