Sanctions are there to cut off 1-2% of GDP each year from the dictatorships' economies.
Over 30 years that turns countries into harmless (to the West) backwater shitholes.
The consequences towards the local populations are just a side-effect (sometimes wanted, sometimes not).
You cannot expect people outside of your dicatorship to prioritize your well being over their own safety. It's on you to fix your country. If you won't - people will isolate you to keep their countries safe.
Can't really blame them.
Some sanctions aim at military capabilities directly - but most just aim to throw a wrench into a country's economy overall. Which does hurt the population - but it also hurts a country's capabilities, which is the goal.
If North Korea wasn't sanctioned to shit, it would have had the resources to build not dozens but hundreds of ICBMs. This is undesirable, so North Korea remains sanctioned to shit.
This is the precise realpolitik of international sanctions, it's just not spoken out loud that often.
Don't believe me, some random commenter. Listen to the Professor of History and Grand Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College explain it: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/B0k5ToABH7o
There is a recent study concluding that sanctions kill half a million people per annum: <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...>
I don't know what you mean by dictatorship but I'm not exactly adverse to applying the same term to the US, it being a one-party state with the audacity of having two parties, and either way, it's by far the most hostile and violent of contemporary state powers.
There's absolutely no moral obligation on an individual in any country to defy these laws and risk prison time - if they want change they can petition, vote and protest.
Beyond that the West is not responsible for any deaths caused by governments that refuse to cooperate with us (and therefore had sanctions placed on them) - that responsibility lies solely with the people and governments of sanctioned nations. We shouldn't be forced into supporting those who seek to destroy us based on HuMAnITaRiaN grounds.
One could also flip your argument and consider the many decades of US narcoterrorism, regime change operations and so on and the rather long line of failed states in its wake, and draw the conclusion that we ought to actually not submit to this 'world power' regardless of whether it 'dresses itself up' to be 'cooperative' while it engages in these activities or not.
This US-centric mindset is so disgusting and emblematic of the narcissism of the west. The country has established itself as the most potent force for violence and economic abuse in the world.
E.g. China sanctions a country then "China is not responsible for any deaths caused by governments that refuse to cooperate with them"
It's entirely the responsibility of each government to ensure the welfare of its own citizens. Anything more is purely goodwill. Anything less is treason.
You're just coping because the US/west is the predominant power.
Or the fault of the husband for beating his wife and the fault of the wife for staying in that relationship?
I get it - it's hard. But you cannot expect the whole world to enable your alcoholic husband/militaristic dictator.
Yet US hegemony is collapsing. It is simply running out of the money and power necessary to be a racketeer that cynically calls itself world police.
