Neither talks for talks’ sake, nor sanctions for sanctions’ sake.

AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, the U.S. Army assembled a team of experts, including the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, to assess the effects of our strategic bombing campaigns in Europe and Asia. For present purposes, let’s stick to what the Strategic Bombing Survey found about strategic bombing in the European theater: that it lacked focus, hit too wide a variety of targets, and had varying levels of impact on each category of target. Our terror bombing of German cities not only failed to break the will of its people, but also hardened Germans’ resolve and made great fodder for Goebbels’s propagandists. Bombing had a high impact on Germany’s truck production, but made little impact on its aircraft and tank production, which Albert Speer so effectively decentralized that both actually peaked very late in the war.

The outstanding, outcome-determinative success of the strategic bombing of Europe was our targeting of the Wehrmacht’s fuel supply, though this came at a high cost in American lives (see, e.g., the 1943 Ploesti raid). Our bombing of synthetic fuel plants and refineries, combined with Germany’s loss of the Crimean and Hungarian oil fields, meant that all of those new tanks (which easily outclassed ours in equal combat on the battlefield) couldn’t maneuver when they were needed to parry allied offensives, starting with Operation Bagration in the east and the D-Day landings in the west. Fuel shortages were a significant factor in preventing Germany from stopping Russian offensives in the Balkans and Poland, from stopping the allies from seizing France, or from prevailing in the 1944 Ardennes Offensive. Fuel shortages contributed to Germany’s loss of the air war, by forcing it to reduce flying hours for both pilot training and defensive operations. Thus, by 1944, Luftwaffe squadrons were often equipped with technically outstanding aircraft flown by poorly trained pilots, when they could fly at all. And because they so often could not fly, our fighter-bombers destroyed many of them on the ground.

If R.A.F. Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force had understood and seized on Germany’s logistical and economic vulnerabilities in 1942, the allies might have defeated Hitler sooner and at a far lower cost in lives. The lives saved would not only have been those of American and British air crews, but also of German civilians in cities like Hamburg and Dresden whose deaths made little contribution to the outcome of the war. Privately, even Curtis LeMay conceded that his orders to bomb Japanese cities might have been war crimes. Soviet soldiers’ lives might also have been saved had Hitler lacked the fuel supplies to attack at Kursk or Kharkov. Civilian lives would have been saved had he been unable to sustain the siege of Leningrad or sustain the pace of mass murder at Belzec, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. Key Nazi leaders might have calculated their interests differently when Colonel Von Stauffenberg planted his bomb under Hitler’s conference table. Had the war turned against Germany sooner, that bomb might have been planted before July 1944.

From this history, we draw a few lessons.

First, then as now, wars are won and lost by economics and industry—and increasingly, by information—much more than by the relative superiority of weapons and tactics.

Second, identifying a winning strategy begins with identifying and attacking an adversary’s vulnerabilities and finding a way to overlook or bypass its strengths.

Third, while conflicts seldom afford the luxury of pristine humanitarianism—and this is true whether one fights or abstains—one should never inflict suffering on a civilian population unless it’s (a) necessary to victory, and (b) necessary to prevent even greater human suffering. These principles are binding as customary international law in armed conflict; I argue that we should also apply them to economic and hybrid warfare, too.

No form of warfare can be waged without causing some human suffering. U.S. and British air raids on legitimate German industrial targets killed countless German civilians and slave laborers from countries under German occupation. The refinery workers who died at Ploesti were not combatants. Regardless of the means by which it is fought, war often presents terrible choices between the suffering we inflict and the suffering we end.

In the case of North Korea, the argument that matters is not the one on Twitter, but the one in the White House. If the hyperbolic things I read in the press are even half true, that argument is coming down to one between a war of violence and a war of economics. Advocating for the latter option (adding to it the essential element of political subversion) does not absolve us of a moral duty to mitigate the suffering it will cause by concentrating our power on our enemies’ capacity and will to wage war against us and our allies. Indeed, I’ve argued that strengthening the relative economic power of North Korea’s poor serves our interest in weakening the regime’s internal control. I believe we have (or can quickly find) the means to do this, but I’m less certain that we recognize the interests we share with North Korea’s poorest people.

The design of a sanctions campaign, and of the broader strategy of which sanctions are an essential component, must also consider similar vulnerabilities and constraints. What are the target’s vulnerabilities? Just as Germany produced airplanes and tanks that it could neither fuel nor crew by the end of 1944, does our production of new sanctions authorities and designations out-pace our capacity to “crew” them with investigators, lawyers, and diplomats? Clearly so. Will the use of any given authority do us more economic, diplomatic, and political harm than the target? Will we face a media or political backlash for unintended consequences, and have we thought through our mitigation and media strategies for answering that? Have we considered how our enemies will respond, particularly using economic and information warfare, and are we prepared to counter those strategies? If I find the time (and increasingly, that’s a very big “if”) I hope to expand on those subjects in the coming weeks.

Those of us who have long criticized talks for talks’ sake must not fall into the trap of sanctions for sanctions’ sake. Sanctions should be targeted to serve specific objectives as part of a coherent, coordinated, whole-of-government strategy. Sanctions, legislation, litigation, intelligence, information operations, diplomacy with third parties, and (eventually) diplomacy with Pyongyang will all be important parts of that strategy, if properly targeted and sequenced. The tactics, objectives, sequence, and strategy all seem completely coherent in my mind, but it’s not my place to communicate those things to a world that would like to see the plan, or alternatively, to exploit our own thoughtless incoherence, with the objective of foiling it. There is no more time to waste on strategies that are futile, counterproductive, incoherent, or simply under-resourced. A tragic end to the Korean crisis could take any of several forms. Our window to escape all of them is closing.