Sanctions Relief for Syria Now

The U.S. should have lifted these sanctions years ago, and now that Assad is out of power there is no excuse for continuing this policy.

The end of Assad’s rule makes most U.S. sanctions on Syria obsolete, so naturally hawks in Congress want to keep them in place:

Republican and Democratic U.S. senators say it is too soon to consider lifting sanctions on Syria following the removal of President Bashar al-Assad, an indication that Washington is unlikely to change its policy any time soon.

U.S. sanctions on Syria are among the most harmful of any that Washington has imposed. They not only choke the Syrian economy directly and interfere with humanitarian assistance, but because of secondary sanctions they also discourage outside states and companies from investing in reconstruction efforts. Broad sanctions in Syria are an attack on the people just as they are an attack on the people in Venezuela, Iran, and elsewhere. The U.S. should have lifted these sanctions years ago, and now that Assad is out of power there is no excuse for continuing this policy. If a post-Assad Syria is to have any hope of rebuilding and recovering, the U.S. and its allies will have to stop inflicting collective punishment on the Syrian people.

Aida Chavez reports on the growing calls for sanctions relief from humanitarian activists and experts:

“Not considering sanctions relief right now is like pulling the rug out from under Syria just when it’s trying to stand,” said Delaney Simon, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “I can’t overemphasize the intensity of the effect of the sanctions on the Syrian economy.”

Farah Stockman recently made the case for sanctions relief in The New York Times:

Ordinary people couldn’t get around [the sanctions], so their businesses closed down. But warlords and cronies politically connected to President Bashar al-Assad got a lucrative monopoly on just about everything. Even when al-Assad was still in power, there was a strong case for letting the [Caesar] act expire on Dec. 20 as scheduled.

Broad sanctions are a terrible policy tool because they are cruel and indiscriminate. They make conditions worse for the entire population without achieving anything. They punish the innocent for policies they don’t control and can’t change. Sanctions cause pointless destruction, and more often than not they backfire on the U.S. as well.

The U.S. was wrong to impose broad sanctions on Syria. The least that our government can do now is to get rid of them so that they won’t continue strangling the Syrian people. The unwillingness of many American politicians to support sanctions relief when it is clearly warranted by the circumstances is another indictment of our destructive foreign policy.

Once imposed, sanctions are hard to remove. The political incentives in our system encourage members of Congress and presidents to support imposing sanctions to show that they are “doing something” about a problem. There are no similar incentives for supporting sanctions relief. It is always possible to find some pretext for keeping sanctions in place once they are there, and sanctions advocates can tack on new justifications when the old ones have become irrelevant. When all else fails, sanctions advocates will argue that the U.S. shouldn’t lift sanctions without extracting additional concessions. That puts the targeted country in a ridiculous position where sanctions relief is always just out of reach.

U.S. policy towards Syria over the last thirteen years has been needlessly destructive. Our government helped to stoke the conflict that devastated the country, and it has waged a pitiless economic war on all Syrians that has only intensified in the last five years. Broad sanctions have made the U.S. an accomplice in the oppression and torment of the people of Syria. The best thing that the U.S. can do now is to stop crushing Syria with sanctions and leave the country alone.