Best quote of his explanation: “This is a situation in which the sanctions were imposed by one important sector of the world economy which then cut itself off from resources that it needs - and that’s particularly true of Western Europe - in return for cutting Russia off from various things that Russia doesn’t really need.”

Second best quote: “If you go back to the period before the introduction of the sanctions […] the Russian economy was very heavily colonized by Western firms. That was true in automobiles, it was true in aircrafts, it was true in everything from fast food restaurants to big box stores. Western firms were present all throughout the Russian economy. A great many of them […] either chose to exit Russia or were pressured to exit Russia after early 2022. So on what terms did they leave? Well, they were required, if they were leaving permanently, to sell their capital equipment, their factories and so forth, to let’s say a Russian business which would get a loan from Russian banks or maybe have other sources of financing, at a very favorable price for the Russians. So effectively a lot of capital wealth, which was partly owned by the West, has been transferred to Russian ownership. And you now have an economy which is moving forward and has the advantage compared to Europe of relatively low resource costs because Russia is a great producer of resources, oil and gas and fertilizer and food stuff and so forth. And so while the Europeans are paying maybe twice in Germany what they were paying for energy, the Russians are not, they’re paying perhaps less than they were paying before the war. So again I characterize the effect of the sanctions, in fact as being in certain respects a gift to the Russian economy. And this is, I think, quite different from what the authors of the sanctions expected. […] And the essence of the situation is this would not have happened without the sanctions. You could have had the war, and it would have gone pretty much as it has gone. But the Russian government in 2022 was in no position to force the exit of Western firms. It didn’t want to, wouldn’t have done that. It was in no position to force its oligarchs to choose between Russia and the West. It didn’t wish to do that. These choices were imposed by the West, and the results were actually, in many respects, favorable to the long-term independent development of the Russian Federation’s economy.”

But what if the purpose of the sanctions was actually not to damage the Russian economy but to damage the European economy, to remove the latter as an economic competitor for the United States and to make it dependent on US energy?

In one of his last books, Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, the great Marxist thinker Samir Amin posed a prescient question.

He saw that the Putin-era Russian state balanced two contradictory economic tendencies. On one hand, it introduced vicious neoliberal reforms, which served exclusively the powerful Western-oriented comprador elites. On the other, it vigorously sought to bolster the country’s economic sovereignty. Which tendency would prevail?

“[I]f the comprador fraction of the Russian ruling classes… ends up gaining the upper hand,” Amin wrote, "then the ‘sanctions’ with which Europe is intimidating Russia could bear fruit. The comprador segments are still disposed to capitulate to preserve their portion of the spoils from the pillaging of their country.” (This, by the way, was the strategy of figures like Alexey Navalny, who hoped against hope that he could effect regime change by striking a bargain with Russia’s pro-Western elites.)

Amin did not live to see the sanctions package introduced against Russia. But I suspect that his insights would have echoed Galbraith’s. By effectively dismantling the Russian comprador class, the sanctions have resolved a central contradiction within the post-Soviet Russian state — in favor of the imperative of sovereign development.

This is precisely the opposite of the intended effect and is deeply revealing of the hubris and analytical poverty of Western imperial policy.

If we take seriously Amin’s notion of a world dominated by the collective imperialism of the Triad — a central thesis of his political thought — and the idea that the present moment is characterized by a new wave of “emergence” from the domination of these centers, then I struggle see any wishful thinking here.

We have a state which, as Galbraith says, has been “heavily colonized by Western firms”. Now, by force of historical necessity, it is advancing across technological, food, medical, informational, and financial sovereignty — Amin’s very definition of an “emergent” state. This is not a qualitative judgment. It is a quantitative observation about the degree of a state’s economic separation from the imperialist centers.

A lot hinges on the analysis of the material basis of the national bourgeoisie versus the comprador bourgeoisie, a distinction that Amin and others have made very clearly. Much of the last great wave of “emergence” (e.g., the Bandung era) was also led by national bourgeois projects. In the long run, neoliberal policies open the state to foreign capital penetration in ways that subordinate it to the domination of the main capitalist centers and undermine the national bourgeoisie, foreclosing pathways to “emergence”.

Whether we see the sanctions as punishment for war or punishment for disobedience with the diktats of empire, they had the opposite of their intended effect — and Amin, like Galbraith, give us a framework that helps explain why. There is a lot more to say — indeed, books have been dedicated to these questions! — but I don’t think it serves us well to dismiss these analytical currents.