Russia has begun deploying naval vessels to escort sanctioned oil tankers past Western navies - a direct physical response to Washington's decision to enforce sanctions with military force rather than financial pressure alone.
Peter E. Harrell, a former senior director at the National Security Council, has flagged the escalation risk in a new Foreign Affairs essay, "Hvylya" reports.
Earlier this month, the Russian navy escorted a Russian tanker through the English Channel, creating what Harrell described as a scenario "ripe for miscalculation or military escalation." Russian officials have denounced the U.S. tanker seizures as "piracy" - the same language Washington has historically used to condemn Iran's periodic seizures of ships in the Persian Gulf.
Harrell noted the irony. The U.S. preference for economic coercion over physical force "was always ideological as well as practical," he wrote: with far more global commercial assets than its adversaries, the United States stood to lose more from a free-for-all in which countries routinely seized each other's ships.
Foreign governments could now decide to issue their own sanctions and target American cargo vessels, Harrell warned. Retaliatory sanctions against the United States have historically had no practical teeth - Russia sanctioned hundreds of people after 2022 with negligible consequences. But if retaliation shifts from paper sanctions to physical seizures, "the risks to U.S. interests rise substantially."
Ukraine's own frustration with the impotence of Western sanctions on Russian energy exports had already spurred Kyiv to intensify military strikes against Russia's energy infrastructure starting last fall. The broader pattern, Harrell argued, is a world in which economic pressure increasingly demands physical force to be effective - and where that force invites retaliation that sanctions alone never did. "Hvylya" previously examined the assumption about energy security that Europe got catastrophically wrong.