Ineffective, Immoral, Politically Convenient: America’s Overreliance on Economic Sanctions and What to Do about It
Bottom Line: Sanctions are rarely effective, often counterproductive, and often have serious humanitarian costs. But domestic political interests make them a consistent feature of American politics despite their various flaws.
Responding to unrest in Syria in 2011, President Obama "signed an executive order that froze the assets of the regime, prohibited the importation of Syrian oil, and made it against the law for any American to invest in Syria or to do business with its government." European countries quickly followed suit, and Syria lost 75 percent of its GDP between 2010 and 2015.
This was the most recent instance in America's longstanding reliance on sanctions. But despite their popularity among policymakers, sanctions rarely succeed in bringing about regime change, and frequently leave people in targeted nations impoverished or dead.
Thanks to the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president has the power to prohibit transactions between people under the jurisdiction of the United States, and any foreign entity. With a single executive order the president can sanction foreign individuals, businesses, or whole countries, without being subject to any real oversight or restriction. The United States frequently recruits allies to join in sanctioning foreign entities.
Though American policymakers present sanctions as policies designed to hurt foreign leaders, they often devastate individuals in a sanctioned country as well. A hamstrung government will struggle to function and effectively serve its citizens, as will a private sector cut off from Western markets. Even with laws designed to protect ordinary citizens (prohibitions on banning the sale of farming equipment, for instance) sanctions still tend to hurt ordinary people.
The Trump administration's sanctions on Venezuela pushed an already shaky economy over the edge. Venezuela's GDP per capita fell from $9,090 to $2,550 from 2016 to 2019. "According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the Trump administration’s economic war on Venezuela led to more than 40,000 excess deaths between 2017 and 2018."
The impact of sanctions on mortality in Syria hasn't been calculated, but we can still see the impact of sanctions. The vaccination rate among Syrian children dropped from 95 percent to 60 percent between 2006 and 2016. "Between 2011 and 2016, Syrian production of wheat fell by 53 percent, lentils by 70 percent, and chickpeas by 30 percent, with an estimated 38 percent of the country being unable to meet basic food requirements as of 2018."
To make matters worse, there's no indication that sanctions tend to achieve their geopolitical goals. Surveying the academic literature on sanctions shows that "scholars who have studied whether sanctions lead to regime change generally agree that they rarely, if ever, work." The few sanctions that tend to work are targeted; the most disastrous sanctions seek regime change.
Still, U.S. policymakers tend to rely on sanctions. This is partially because policymakers "have shown no interest in the empirical research" on sanctions, and partially because policymakers aren't actually interested in using the leverage gained by sanctions to achieve foreign policy goals. Rather than attempting to deal with sanctioned nations to draw success from their place of weakness, the United States frequently cuts off all contact with sanctioned nations.
"Thus, from the perspective of the instrumental approach, American policy makes no sense." America's position on sanctions only makes sense when one considers the domestic incentives that motivate lawmakers.
Given the political realities, there are several steps policymakers can take to "prevent the overuse of sanctions." Any sanctions that are implemented should be "restricted to symbolic targets, which would allow American leaders to achieve their political goals without harming innocents abroad." Additionally, the United States should take a more lax approach to enforcing sanctions, and Congress should act to make it harder for the president to unilaterally impose endless sanctions.
Read the full policy analysis here.
