Opposing view: We’re turning off billions of dollars in deals

The State and Treasury departments declined to provide an opposing view. Excerpts from a State Department briefing on Tuesday:

“We have spent a considerable amount of time and energy on engaging with partners, with allies, with private industry, and in fact, globally with countries around the world, explaining what (the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) meant — the (State Department) provision, the sanctions attached to it — and demarching countries where we thought there could be potential sanctionable activity, explaining to them the consequences, and pushing them to stop potential deals that could run afoul of (the Act).

We have been able to turn off potential deals that equal several billion dollars. And that is real success, it’s real money, and it’s real revenue that is not going to the Kremlin and is not going to Russia as part of the intent of this law and the intent of this administration, to remind Russia and remind the Russian government of the costs of its malign activity.

You cannot only judge the success of sanctions based on public rollout (of sanctions). Cutting off and stopping potential deals is success even if you don’t see the rollout of sanctions.

That doesn’t mean that if we determined ... that there is sanctionable activity, we, of course, will roll out public sanctions.

We can’t go into our sensitive diplomatic discussions, but I assure you that the Russians know when a deal that they thought was moving forward is all of a sudden falling apart and not moving forward, they know which deals are being turned off.

And that is having the intended consequence.”