Re: Sanctions
Sorry, but you do not have the slightest idea about the real effect of sanctions.
I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, so it was affected by the Western sanctions, but in reality those did not have any effect on the technological capabilities.
The local engineers knew perfectly well how to make anything that could be made in the US or UK, both from local research and from reverse engineering, and also from technical information provided by spies, which included even such things like complete mask sets of integrated circuits.
Despite that, they almost never could do anything close to what their technological know-how would have permitted.
The real reason why there was a large and continuously increasing technological disparity between the Western countries and the communist countries had nothing to do with sanctions.
The local engineers could not make what they knew how to make because they were crippled by the parasitic communist management that infested every company and institution, which ensured that any kind of rewards or promotions had nothing to do with the quality of the work and which resisted any kind of improvements in any domain.
The communist countries failed entirely due to internal causes, not due to any kind of external sanctions and pressures. Few actions of USA or allies had any successful influence, and that was only by indirect effects, e.g. the show played by Reagan with the Strategical Defense Initiative, which fooled the Russians into increasing their military spending even more over what they could sustain.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
