The Never-ending Sanctions Story

If it is just a matter of “doing something” to express disapproval, the targeted state has no incentive to change and the governments imposing the sanctions will never will lift them.

Paul Poast concludes that U.S. and allied sanctions on Russia aren’t working:

Nearly a year into the application of these severe sanctions, a natural question arises: Are they working? Unfortunately, the answer is no. If the past year has reinforced any lesson, it is that economic coercion alone is not enough to achieve a policy goal. This lesson should already have been clear from numerous other cases of sanctions that failed to change a targeted country’s behavior, such as the long-standing U.S. embargo of Cuba. Instead, it will have to be learned again in this case. Indeed, given the comprehensive nature of these sanctions, they may well demonstrate the ultimate futility of economic coercion as a foreign policy instrument.

Poast is correct, and most of his argument lines up with what I was saying back in June. As I put it then: “Economic coercion through broad sanctions can cause tremendous destruction, but it routinely fails to advance U.S. interests or improve security conditions in other parts of the world. It is time to recognize that broad sanctions do more harm than good, and they worsen many of the problems they are supposed to remedy.”

If the only thing economic warfare is good for is to inflict pain on the weak and the vulnerable, it is not a useful or reliable foreign policy tool. To the extent that broad sanctions tend to backfire, they are also a menace to our own interests. If you had a tool that couldn’t get the job done but sometimes exploded and set things on fire, you would stop using that tool very quickly. Unfortunately, the U.S. has been using the hazardous, malfunctioning tool of sanctions more frequently in the last few decades even as that tool has become measurably less successful.