What Sanctions Get Right: A Useful Tool Has Been Unjustly Maligned
Foreign Affairs · S. C. M. Paine and Anand Toprani ·
A useful tool has been unjustly maligned.
The United States frequently uses sanctions or embargoes to rein in malign actors. When policymakers become dissatisfied with the results, they often embrace military action next. Washington, for example, applied sanctions on Iraq for more than a decade before invading the country in 2003. It did the same with Iran, using sanctions to pressure the government into nuclear negotiations in the 2010s and then, after withdrawing from the resulting agreement in 2018, going to war with Tehran in February 2026.
Washington follows this pattern of behavior because sanctions alone rarely—if ever—make a problem disappear, such as by toppling the government responsible. This frustrates Americans, who tend to seek simple, quick, and permanent fixes to foreign policy problems. Many interpret the persistence of these problems as evidence that sanctions are futile. But the effectiveness of sanctions is measured in crises that do not occur—the nuclear test that never happens, for instance, or the shipping lane that remains undisturbed. These successes are invisible, but an adversary’s continuing provocations are not. As a result, American officials often conclude that it is necessary to turn to war.
This logic reflects a misunderstanding about how sanctions work. Sanctions may not be able to achieve maximalist aims, yet when they are deployed in concert with other policy tools, they can help manage problems. They do this by reliably depressing the target country’s economic growth over time. Although this hurts innocent civilians in the targeted countries as their leaders shift the costs from regime supporters to the politically disenfranchised, no government can escape the inexorable math of slowing economic growth. If an economy starts out with a three percent growth rate—roughly the global average—it will double in size in around 23 years. But if sanctions reduce annual growth to one percent, doubling in size will take 70 years, three times as long. Just compare the North Korean and South Korean economies, or look at nighttime satellite imagery of the Korean Peninsula, to see the compounding effects of sanctions over generations. Although sanctions may not change the targeted regime’s aspirations, they reduce its financial wherewithal and may deter other governments from emulating the behavior that precipitated the sanctions.
Read the full story at Foreign Affairs · All coverage of this story