What do US sanctions actually accomplish?
Sanctions have become a principal tool of U.S. foreign policy.
There are reasons to doubt the wisdom of this.
The U.S. maintains a current sanctions regimen, to identify only the biggies, against Russia, Iran, Turkey, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba.
We apply sanctions for a variety of reasons. Some are supposedly for human rights violations. Some are supposedly for national security reasons.
For example, sanctions have been imposed against Russia for its takeover of Crimea, the attempted killing of a double agent in Britain, and interfering in U.S. elections.
Sanctions take various forms. Sometimes we target senior leaders, threatening assets they might have in the United States and prohibiting their travel to this
country.
Other times, we try to cut off the access of entire countries to the U.S. financial system, which, at present, is tantamount to cutting off their access to the global financial system.
These sanctions have effects. The economies of the countries we have targeted for sanctions have been damaged, in some cases severely.
But, presumably, the purpose of the sanctions isn’t to inflict economic damage. Presumably, the purpose is to alter the behavior of the countries targeted. In that regard, there is scant evidence that our sanctions regimens have much of an effect.
Russia isn’t going to give back Crimea. It isn’t going to respect human rights at home. It isn’t going to stop trying to undermine faith in democratic governance in NATO countries, which it perceives as attempting to hem it in. And it probably isn’t going to stop going after Russian apostates living in other countries.
The United States has maintained a sanctions regimen against Cuba for over a half century, with no notable effect on either its internal or external activities.
Some believe that a sanctions regimen brought Iran and North Korea to the table to discuss curtailing their nuclear weapons programs. In both cases, discerning motives is difficult. And so far, the fruit of those discussions remains uncertain.
For the most part, the United States is making a statement with our sanctions, expressing our disapproval of the behavior that supposedly triggered their adoption. But there are adverse consequences to this particular method of making a statement.
In imposing sanctions for human rights violations, it exposes our transparent hypocrisy. As always, Saudi Arabia is the primary example. It is one of the most repressive regimes in the world. But we not only impose no sanctions on it, we trade freely with it. We even sell it arms.
The greatest human rights violation on the planet right now is arguably the mass incarceration of Uighurs in re-education camps by China. But that hasn’t triggered U.S. sanctions.
Sanctions can make the U.S. part of the story when we shouldn’t be. That’s happening in Venezuela.
With the rise of socialist sentiment, Venezuela is a useful reminder of its catastrophic consequences.
Yet the U.S., by imposing sanctions, has blurred the lesson. We first targeted senior leaders, but then targeted the entire country by forbidding Americans from buying any Venezuelan debt.
That permits autocrat Nicolas Maduro to blame the country’s economic collapse on the United States, and that’s at least partially correct.
The short-term effect of sanctions is often to strength the hand of the autocrats. That was the case in Iraq, under Saddam Hussein. And it seems to have been the case in Iran. As sanctions made it more difficult for private businesses to function, the ruling clerics and the Revolutionary Guard took over larger swaths of the economy.
So far, sanctions haven’t proved to have much in the way of long-term effects either. Certainly not in Cuba. Perhaps they will produce results in Iran and North Korea. But doubters would seem to have the better case at present.
Using access to the U.S. economy as a weapon carries risks. It increases the incentive of other countries to find ways to do business that exclude us. And not just our adversaries, the targets of our sanctions. The European Union, which wants to salvage the Iranian nuclear deal, is actively trying to figure out a way to enable its members to do business with Iran despite the U.S. sanctions.
There needs to be some serious thinking about the casual way the United States has come to impose sanctions. It may prove to be an expensive way of making a statement.