Trump's Sanctions Lies

No one is a bigger fan of economic coercion than Trump, and no one should believe him when he pretends to be something else.

Trump told a big lie about his record on sanctions this week. He said, “I use sanctions very powerfully against countries who deserve it, then I take them off [bold mine-DL].” When he was president, Trump never lifted sanctions anywhere, but just kept adding more every year that he was in office. He is pretending that he was reasonable in how he used this policy tool, but when he was in charge he was a sanctions addict. No one is a bigger fan of economic coercion than Trump, and no one should believe him when he pretends to be something else.

At the end of his answer, Trump said, “I want to use sanctions as little as possible.” We know that isn’t true. Trump’s foreign policy was defined by the overuse of broad sanctions. The Trump administration imposed so many sanctions of different kinds that it set a new record with 3,900 distinct sanctions actions. As The Economist reported in 2019, “his administration has been more enthusiastic than any other in history in using financial sanctions.”

Trump used sanctions early and often, and he kept piling them on to inflict as much misery on the targeted countries as he could. He took great satisfaction in the devastation that his sanctions caused, and he has never stopped boasting about how much damage he caused to the economies of other countries. In his acceptance speech at the convention this summer, he proudly declared, “Iran was broke.” He neglected to mention that it was his Iran policy that was truly bankrupt.

One of Trump’s main complaints against Biden on Iran policy is that Biden has supposedly been too lax in enforcing existing sanctions. Shortly after the October 7 attack, Trump claimed that the attack happened in part because of this. That was another lie, but it was a popular talking point among Iran hawks at the start of the war and Trump was happy to run with it.

The people around Trump love sanctions, too. Trump’s advisers are eager to intensify the economic war against Iran. Robert O’Brien, his former National Security Advisor, called for a “return to maximum pressure” in an article outlining a future Trump foreign policy agenda, and there is no reason to think that Trump disagrees with this. Abusing America’s economic and financial power was Trump’s signature move as president, and he didn’t care that it blew up in his face again and again. The economic war against Iran pushed their government to expand its nuclear program and ratcheted up tensions between the U.S. and Iran so much that it nearly caused a major war. The “maximum pressure” campaign against North Korea led to the expansion of their nuclear arsenal. Trump’s push for regime change in Venezuela was a flop.

It would be a good thing if Trump repudiated his old sanctions policies, but he isn’t going to do that. Broad sanctions are cruel and destructive, and that is exactly what Trump likes about them. He likes wielding that power over the lives of tens of millions of people in the targeted countries, and if he wins in November it is safe to assume that he will abuse that power even more than he did the first time.