Diplomacy deadlock: Severe tools of the US foreign policy arsenal

There is nearly universal consensus that certain egregious violations of international laws and norms demand a forceful and concerted response. Think only, for example, of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the development of nuclear weapons capabilities in Iran and North Korea. Harsh economic sanctions have long been viewed as the answer.

The eternal question, though, is: What comes next? When do sanctions stop working? Or worse, when do they start working against the United States’ best interests? These are important questions because, over the past two decades, economic sanctions have become a tool of first resort for US policymakers, used for disrupting terrorist networks, trying to stop the development of nuclear weapons and punishing dictators. The number of names on the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions list has risen steadily, from 912 in 2000 to 9,421 in 2021, largely because of the growing use of banking sanctions against individuals.

The Trump administration added about three names a day to the list — a rate surpassed last year with the flurry of sanctions that President Biden announced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Given their increasing use, then, it is useful to understand not only how sanctions can be a tool for successful diplomacy but also how, when not employed well, they can ultimately undermine American efforts to promote peace, human rights and democratic norms across the globe. Policymakers turn to sanctions so frequently — the United States accounts for 42 percent of sanctions imposed worldwide since 1950, according to Drexel University’s Global Sanctions Database — in part because they are seen as being low cost, especially compared with military action. In reality, the costs are substantial. They are borne by banks, businesses, civilians and humanitarian groups, which shoulder the burden of putting them into effect, complying with them and mitigating their effects. Sanctions can also take a toll on vulnerable people — often poor and living under repressive governments, as academics are increasingly documenting.

Officials rarely factor in such costs. While sanctions are easy to impose — there are dozens of sanctions programs administered by multiple federal agencies — they are politically and bureaucratically difficult to lift, even when they no longer serve US interests. What’s worse, sanctions also escape significant public scrutiny. Few officials are held responsible for whether a particular sanction is working as intended rather than needlessly harming innocent people or undermining foreign policy goals. Biden came into office promising to rectify that lack of accountability. The Treasury Department conducted a comprehensive review of sanctions in 2021 and released a seven-page summary that October. The review process was an important step. It concluded, among other things, that sanctions should be systematically assessed to make sure they are the right tool for the circumstances, that they be linked to specific outcomes and include our allies where possible and that care should be taken to mitigate “unintended economic and political impacts” on American workers, businesses, allies and other innocent people. The Treasury Department is making some progress in carrying out the review’s recommendations, but Treasury is just one of many government agencies responsible for fulfilling sanctions. Every one of them should conduct regular, data-driven analyses to ensure that the benefits of sanctions outweigh the costs and that sanctions are the right tool, not just the easiest one to reach for. It is also important that the results of such analyses are communicated to Congress and the public. Sanctions need achievable outcomes What is already known is that sanctions are most effective when they have realistic objectives and are paired with promises of relief if those objectives are met.

Perhaps the best example is the 1986 law targeting apartheid-era South Africa, which laid out five conditions for sanctions relief, including the release of Nelson Mandela. Sanctions by the United States and other nations helped convince South Africa’s whites-only government that its policies mandating racial segregation were unsustainable. Sanctions on Communist Poland in 1981 in response to the crushing of the Solidarity movement are another example of how this can work. The United States and its allies gradually lifted sanctions with the release of most imprisoned activists, helping usher in a new era of political freedom in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It’s notable that the sanctions against South Africa and Poland were aimed at bringing about free and fair elections, not regime change.

Sanctions aimed at regime change often incentivise defiance, not reform. They have a terrible track record, as the cases of Cuba, Syria and Venezuela make clear. In Venezuela, open-ended sanctions with sweeping ambition — to oust the dictator Nicolas Maduro — have so far achieved the opposite.

After he dissolved the democratically elected National Assembly in 2017 and was declared the winner of a sham presidential election in 2018, the Trump administration imposed maximum-pressure sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company to cut off a crucial source of funds to the Maduro dictatorship.

Sanctions need to be reversible Peter Harrell, who served on the National Security Council staff under Biden, argues that sanctions should automatically expire after a certain number of years unless Congress votes to extend them.

That would cut down on cases of zombie sanctions that go on for decades, long after US policymakers have given up on the sanctions’ achieving their goals.

For sanctions to incentivise change rather than merely punish actions in the past, the United States should be prepared to lift sanctions — even against odious actors — if the stated criteria are met. Sanctions, as attractive as they are, rarely work without specific goals combined with criteria for sanctions to be lifted.

That applies to current as well as future sanctions. Without goals and relief criteria, these measures — among the most severe in the US foreign policy arsenal — risk working against American interests and principles in the long run.