Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s land grab in Syria, like his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin’s Crimea annexation, has met with a weak international response. Will that encourage more land grabs? Any nations thinking of doing so should be warned: Such conquests succeed only if they don’t set off full-scale wars. The U.S. has frozen the assets of the Turkish defense and energy ministries as well as those of the defense, energy and interior ministers. President Donald Trump also promised to stop negotiations with Turkey on a trade deal and to raise tariffs on Turkish steel. Turkey will barely notice these sanctions. It’s likely that the ministries and officials have no U.S. assets, and their ability to continue using U.S. financial assets through other branches of the Turkish government is more or less unlimited. The European Union, for its part, agreed that its member states would commit “to strong national positions regarding their arms export policy to Turkey” — not quite an arms embargo, but a recommendation that European nations stop selling arms to Ankara. This is something Germany, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Sweden have already promised to do. Erdogan could have lived with a full embargo, too: Russia is only too happy to sell him more weapons. The sanctions on Turkey are even weaker than those imposed on Russia after it seized Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014. That month, the U.S. and the EU imposed some travel bans and asset freezes on Russians believed to be involved in the operation, and the Europeans also prohibited all business with Crimea itself. Russia shrugged off these restrictions. Harsher measures, to which Russia responded with some import bans, only followed an escalation in eastern Ukraine and the downing of a Malaysian passenger airliner over territory held by pro-Russian rebels.

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Like Putin before him, Erdogan can rest easy that his country won’t be hit with anything resembling the harsh UN Security Council-authorized sanctions slapped on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Those included an all-embracing trade and financial embargo. The weakness of the Crimea- and northern Syria-related sanctions undermines the idea of a “territorial integrity norm” that is supposed to have crystallized in the post-World War II era. The emergence and acceptance of this norm — a general international consensus against military conquest and armed secession — is often credited for the declining number of conquest attempts in recent decades. But the conclusions of political scientist Mark Zacher, whose 2001 paper promoted the idea that this territorial integrity norm had led to a dramatic decrease in the number of border changes, has been challenged in more recent research. A causal link between the norm and the prevalence of land grabs is turning out hard to prove. In a recent paper, Dan Altman of Georgia State University holds that conquest has never really gone obsolete. Instead, he claims, based on several updated datasets of interstate conflicts, that the nature of land grabs has changed: As states increasingly came to shy away from intentionally waging war, war-prone forms of conquest declined earlier and more strongly. Conquest attempts more consistent with the fait accompli strategy and its aim of avoiding war proved more enduring. These tend to target smaller territories, especially those with little or no population and no military garrison that would need to be removed. It could have transpired that states would forgo conquest almost altogether as they increasingly sought to avoid starting wars. Instead, states avoided only war-prone conquest while persisting with comparatively war-averse conquest. According to Altman, all the states responsible for the nine initial conquest attempts that led to wars — that is, conflicts with more than 1,000 battle deaths — since 1975 ended up losing the conquered territory. But out of the total of 30 land grabs involving parts of states that occurred between 1980 and 2018, conquest initiators held on to their territorial gains in half the cases. That means the successful conquerors are those who avoid a war.