The Evils of Broad Sanctions

Impoverishing and starving people are all that such sanctions are good for, and that is typically all that they ever do

The New York Times recently published a valuable report on the destructive effects of sanctions on the people of Syria. It cites a couple of experts that call attention to the humanitarian impact that such sweeping sanctions have on the affected population. It shows that the administration’s excuse-making about humanitarian exemptions isn’t credible. The report is consistent with what I warned about in my article on Caesar Act sanctions. There needs to be even more of this reporting to drive home to the public how senseless and cruel broad sanctions are.

The story also reinforces the idea that the sanctions are being imposed to “solve” a “problem,” and that the main flaw with the sanctions is that they will not “solve” it. It begins with the headline: “Trump’s Syria Sanctions ‘Cannot Solve the Problem,’ Critics Say.” One of the critics of the sanctions quoted in the piece does say this at one point, but most of the strongest objections to the policy are different from this. For example, the report includes another quote from the same John E. Smith, a former director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control:

“The regime elites continue to flourish, they continue to get luxury goods, they continue to do their shopping trips,” Mr. Smith said. “It is generally the people of the jurisdiction that pay the ultimate penalty from the poverty that is inflicted on that government.”

This is the heart of the issue. The sanctions won’t “solve” the “problem” of the Syrian government staying in power because there is no way that they could. The sanctions have been imposed for the sake of exacting punishment and inflicting economic pain. They are not meant to “solve” anything, unless one thinks of normal commerce, health care, and reconstruction as problems. Impoverishing and starving people are all that such sanctions are good for, and that is typically all that they ever do. The reason to be appalled by this policy is that it mostly hurts ordinary people at the same time that it does little or nothing to the top members of the government. It strangles the innocent and the vulnerable, and perversely this tends to strengthen the grip that the wealthy and well-connected people in the country have on power. Broad sanctions against entire countries need to be rejected because they are immoral exercises in collective punishment and outrageous attacks on the health and well-being of tens of millions of people.