Quote from: First77 on September 19, 2018, 10:26:23 PM

The system of multilateral cooperation, which took years to build, is no longer allowed to evolve. It is being broken in a very crude way. Breaking the rules is becoming the new rule, he said. The ability to impose sanctions arbitrarily and with no control fosters a temptation to use such restrictive tools again and again, right and left, in every case, regardless of political loyalty, talks about solidarity, past agreements and long cooperation, he said.

One interesting point here is sanctions mainly being imposed against nations which geographically border china. Sanctions against both north korea and russia made both countries more dependent upon china. This in turn gave china leverage in trade & negotiations with both countries fueling china's economic growth.

So while sanctions on the surface may appear designed to punish north korea and russia, the true end game may be forcing both to become more dependent upon china, to fuel china's economy. There is a substantial and widespread precedent for this scenario being possible with china typically being shown massive favortism by media, banks and global policies around the world which benefit china at the expense of american and european economies.

That's a good point Putin made about global "cooperation" being largely replaced with "isolationism" or "protectionism". People may be losing their capacity to cooperate and coordinate which could be a significant negative trend over the long term as workers fail to cooperate in unionizing and citizens fail to cooperate to support the right economic or financial policies and so on.